The Game
by DrerrRedclaw
Summary: One man dies: chaos, order, and everything in between ensues. Character studies, ShikaTema, NejiTen. Futurefic, expect OOC due to age and experience.
1. Thinking on the Fly::The Game

For the seventh time that night, the Anbu silently curses the enameled mask occluding his face from sight. It bothers him, restricts his view slightly, but he understands its necessity. His hood is up, concealing the spiky hair that has long been his trademark, an oddity in a team of professional assassins for whom anonymity is key.

The pitch black of the new moon's night enfolds him, caresses him, hides him where he perches squatting on an impossibly slender bough. In spite of this, he knows precisely where the other two members of his team are waiting, hidden. He knows, because he told them where they should be, and he's been working with them far too long to think that they could be anywhere else.

He knows, for example, that his first teammate is already in position. His stealth master should be prone, face down on the hillock behind the shed with a corrugated metal roof just under twenty metres forward of the Anbu leader's position. He doesn't look like he's breathing. He almost doesn't have to.

Just off to his left, huddled at the base of a slender elm, his second cloaked companion is still, as much as she can be. He can feel her slight aura, but only because he knows where she is. She's doing her best to mask the usually profound signature her technique is giving off. Then, it disappears. She's been using it in bursts, to avoid detection. They all know their target might yet be good enough to pick up even a concealed chakra. Still no takers for their little trap.

For all intents and purposes, he'd rather not be here, but the stars are kind of nice, after all. Hours pass, crawling by inexorably, and he spends the time staring up at the stars, tracking their slow rotation around the sky's invisible pole. After a while, the Anbu leader is pretty sure he's pinpointed it. This far out from the city, the stars are brighter, more populous, a lively mosaic of lighted pinpricks, scattered like sand over the dome of the night. He wouldn't mind being out so late if all he had to do was sit here in this tree and stare upwards.

Movement catches his eye. His senses are focused now, his mind launched to its fullest alert by this miniscule visual trigger, but his body remains loose, balanced, unperturbed. A breeze whispers carelessly past him as he slowly, silently adjusts his footing on the branch, and he can feel his companion's aura again, as she flicks on her technique again. Inside the dimly-lit hut, a match flashes to life, then dims and dies and it transfers its light to a single, waxy candle. Acrid gray smoke rises smoothly from the charred wick, and the candle suddenly projects through the open window like a dim searchlight. Or, it might as well be, the way it fills the clearing with awkwardly dancing shadows on an orange stage. The candle's flame flits about for a few seconds more, then goes out, extinguished by a puff of breath from an equally invisible occupant of the shed. That must be their target's signal.

So alerted, he can hear them now. They are arrogant in their secrecy, sure that they haven't been detected, that their meeting place hasn't been betrayed. In the night air, he hears his spotter emulate the sound of a small local owl, the signal for three approaching on foot. The two in the shed haven't moved or done much since their arrival hours ago, except debate the relative merits of the deal they're about to be making.

Under his mask, he half-grimaces, half-smiles, the corner of his mouth unintentionally soaking up the dew left behind by his breath. Five on three, a pain in the ass under any circumstances. They weren't expecting any more than one new arrival -- apparently the visitor is a little more paranoid than they thought.

He doesn't have to notify his teammates; it's a contingency they planned for earlier that afternoon before heading out, but not one they were expecting. Worse, he doesn't have any information on the two men tagging along. He breathes deeply once, his grimace folding into a wry smile. Time to think on the fly.

Because this is when shit starts happening.

OoOoOoO

She waits for him.

He'll be back, soon, she knows. The Anbu have a lot of duties, certes, and the debriefing he's off doing now has a lot to do with it. Idly, she leans back on her arms, palms down against the tiled roof of his apartment, watching the road below. It bustles, full, packed with people and impromptu market stands. Polychromatic banners hang from the high walls of this avenue, clashing with the neon brilliance that fills the night air. She can't see the stars, washed out from the glare of this twisting river of light that winds though Konoha.

Still, she's not sure whether she prefers the stars to the crowd below. It's so different, she supposes, and that's what fascinates her about this place. She always wondered why someone so quiet would choose to live in such a noisy place. She's never fully understood him, doubts she ever will, but maybe that was the point.

There's something subtly exiting about being here, in this city. For one thing, she's here illegally, without a visa, without the papers that would make this visit legitimate. She knows she's good enough to get in and out without being seen, but to risk so much for something so petty, something so utterly crucial...it sends tingles up her spine.

She knows she can't get into his place. Well, technically, she can. She is a fully trained ninja, after all. Perhaps it would be better to say she shouldn't go into his place. Not that that's ever stopped her before, although she decides against it for now. Suddenly, inexplicably curious, she drops onto the balcony outside his room, peering inside.

The room is dark, but backlit with the pink glow of a billboard for a restaurant across the street. Stark shadows fill the room, her own, the flagpole bearing an advertisement, the frame of the window itself. Smaller shadows from objects inside the room ripple across the floor, like the patterns of light on the bottom of a river on a clear day. It's vaguely aesthetic, and she finds herself silently approving.

His things are remarkably well ordered, for him, she thinks, framing her eyes with cupped hands to block out the glare from all the lights out in the street. The oddly superfluous streetlamp directly above her isn't helping any, so she plays with her fingers, trying to block out as much as possible. His bed is the furthest thing from immaculate, all tangled blankets and twisted sheets. A pillow sits on the floor, bent awkwardly and nowhere near the low futon. She tries to imagine the smell of the sheets, tries to imagine how he smells and it comes to her, slowly. He smells earthy, grassy...virile.

His clothes are strewn over the floor, simple shirts, simple pants, simple shorts, none of which he wears without conjugating them with his regular ninja gear. There's a pile of them against the one wall, and another pile barely contained within a bulging laundry bag. A third pile of clothing lies neatly folded in a duffle bag by the bed, and she idly wonders who got so threatening that he gave in and actually folded his laundry. His mother, probably. Her lips quirk in the slightest twinge of a smile at the thought.

There is a stack of books on the floor by the bed, next to a small desk lamp. None of them have bookmarks in them that she can see, but she imagines that they've been read in chronological order from the bottom to the top of the pile. She realizes she's having fun trying to get into his head.

A low table sits in the middle of the room, with a turning platform on it, and she wonders why he would have that until it hits her.

Of course.

OoOoOoO

The three men have almost reached the house when the sound of glass shattering distracts them. One of the windows on the east side of the house disintegrates into sparkling shards, flashing inwards, tumbling through the air uncontrolled in the wake of a single iron spike, thrown with near-perfect accuracy through the centre of the frame. Inside, it hits the table, sticking at an acute angle, invisible in the darkness. That is, before the enchanted slip of paper tied to its end begins to burn.

A soft light pounces through the clearing, catching the attention of the newly arrived. Stillness reigns for an instant, usurped by chaos as the hut's two occupants dive screaming out of the north and west windows, flirting with the glass shards as they fall, pursued by a shockwave of fire and violence that sunders the rotten wooden walls of the structure. Splinters flit outwards, spiraling, pirouetting, as the beams holding the room crack, but hold.

For an instant, time stops completely, and the three men are frozen, hands on whatever weapons they have, or dropping back into fighting stances.

"There!" shouts one of the body guards, pointing the in direction the exploding kunai had come from, pointing directly at the hiding place of the Anbu spotter. But too late; five, six more of the hammered iron spikes sing in the darkness, unerring in their razor-straight course, directly towards the arrivals.

The pointing guard ducks, drawing his sword with his opposite hand, and swings to deflect. He hits nothing, because none of them were intended for him. Instead, all six are headed directly towards the cloaked man in the centre, the man whose head is completely wrapped in dark bandages, flashing a deep ochre in the bright glow of the burning house. The bandages are stained, splotchy, glistening with a sheen of what could be blood.

The leprous mummy snorts derisively. "Anbu."

Suddenly his cloak shreds apart in a roiling flurry of blue light, as he is surrounded by a hissing, perfect sphere of his own chakra. The kunai strike home, strike true, but they cannot penetrate the Hyuuga house's perfect defensive technique. One of them is even launched directly back at the markswoman who threw them, whistling back into the darkness. There is a barely audible thud as it strikes a tree. Certainly, she is too smart to stay in one place after even one throw, let alone two.

The guards have their swords out now, and are standing back to back, facing away from the house, away from the fire. There is no sign of the occupants of the house, however, who have somehow vanished into the glare.

There is no point hiding now; the missing Hyuuga is here, along with his would-be co-conspirators. Time to end this. The Anbu captain drops softly into the grass, glistening with dew, and beckons to the bandaged man. This is going to hurt, he thinks, to himself. A lot. But it wouldn't do to have this opponent go running after his companions before they'd mopped up everyone else. None of them really stood a chance fighting this criminal directly, and he wasn't going to let one of them take the brunt of it for him. A pair of kunai drop into his fingers from his sleeves.

"Impossible," one of them exclaims, breathless as adrenaline surges into his system, "we were promised this place was secure!"

"No matter," grates their maimed leader in some feculent approximation of laughter, "there are only three. We kill them, like we did the others." And then, impossibly, the mummy points directly at the captain, though blindfolded by his wrappings. "This one is mine. You two, take the one in the trees."

A whisper promises to find the last one.

With that, the lead Anbu ninja falls into his most reliable fighting stance, but keeps his hands under his cloak. He hates getting hit; more so by a Hyuuga. This is going to suck. At least he's got some armour on. It'll slow him down, but maybe it'll prevent the bastard from wrecking too much of his body.

OoOoOoO

Through an arch at the back of his sleeping quarters, she can see his kitchen, a vast contrast to his actual living area. If not for the open shelving unit filled with instant noodles and freeze dried dinners, the kitchen might have never been used from the day he moved in. The microwave door is open, though, and the light from the solitary bulb inside that metallic cabinet glows like a static candle from where it is hidden by the bulk of the fridge. She's almost sure the fridge is mostly empty, maybe with the exception of some canned drinks.

The turntable in his room makes so much sense now, she thinks, spotting the well-ordered book case. For the most part, the shelves are filled with books whose titles she cannot read, shrouded in the darkness as they are, but on the one shelf at waist height, she finds the boards he adores so much. Shogi, chess, go. Another one she doesn't recognize. Antique boards, immaculately polished and well-cared for. They gleam in the virulent pink light of the neon billboard.

She's always been faintly surprised at how well he takes care of those things, but knows she shouldn't be. Otherwise nothing material has any significance for him.

The pieces rest on top, organized for play already. The go tokens sit in their round wooden bowls, looking for all the world like little candies in the pink light. Kings, queens, generals, knights, lances, rooks, bishops, and pawns stand in orderly rows on the other boards...the world on a table top. A perfect world of black and white where everybody follows the rules. For a moment, she's awed at how well he does in her world, where nobody follows the rules, because following the rules gets you killed.

She knows she'll never ask him. He wouldn't say a thing anyway.

She pushes back from the glass, snorting in amusement at the cone of vapor her breath has left on the glass and idly reaches up to run a hand through her long blonde hair. Then, idly, she runs her hand back down the side of her face and leans into the railing of the balcony. Her neck is sore from bending in peer through the sliding glass door, so she cranes her head backwards, eyes closed, listening to the murmuring crowd below. The stretch feels good, and it's nice to feel like herself again.

OoOoOoO

The spotter in the trees is on the move, skirting the engagement zone. She moves quickly, her quick, staccato steps silent in the grass as she bounds lightly over gnarled roots and dry, fallen branches. Quietly, she pauses, pulling another handful of flying weaponry out of her pouch. The swordsmen are definitely pursuing her now. But she's not remarkably worried about them, she thinks, as she unleashes a handful of shuriken in their direction. Behind them, silhouetted against the flames, she can see her captain and their bandaged target watching each other, staring each other down, looking for weaknesses in each other's ability.

Her pursuers are good, she'll give them that, as they swing their swords, deflecting the inbound stars, catching them by the dusky glint of the fire. Undoubtedly, they're following her chakra now, it's too hard to keep up the technique she needs to be using and concealing herself at the same time.

The conflagration consuming the house flares, and she spots the scratched out Mist insignia on their headbands. All she has to do is lead the chase for now, lead them on, lead them away. Her captain has more than enough to deal with for the moment.

Besides which, they're not the ones she's worried about at the moment. At least, she won't be. Not in a few seconds. Not if her compatriot is where he's supposed to be.

He is. But he isn't what brings the man in the back down.

The rear-most ninja is flattened by an invisible force, an unseen hand that suddenly blasts him over sideways and drops him to the ground. His sword spirals off into the darkness, carried away by a blast of wind entirely out of proportion for this clear, stormless night. He flails his arms impotently as he falls and rolls. He's good, she thinks, as he ends up on his feet and seems to steady himself.

It's not enough. The spotter's masked companion materializes into existence out of nowhere, too fast for his victim to see, and slams him into a tree with an open left hand. The bole of the tree shatters, and it creaks in the wind. The last of the swordsman's energy ceases to flow through his body, the surest symptom of a stopped heart. He never even saw it coming.

The other swordsman turns, shouts a challenge. Her companion stands still, arms down, impassive. Now she can deal with the one that disappeared after jumping through the window. The other one, well, she's not worried about in the slightest.

Time to get that bastard out from his hiding place under ground.

OoOoOoO

"I'll stop here," he says, his voice filtering up from below her, dark and sinuous, like the shadows he calls home when he's not here. She keeps her eyes closed, pretending she can't hear him. She can feel the kiss of lights shining on her eyelids, taste the smoke and the spices wafting up from the street below on her barely parted lips.

She's still waiting for him. Waiting for him to say goodbye to his friends, his teammates. She knows they're with him, she can hear the familiar voices bubbling around his still, imperturbable presence. He's like a rock in a stream, immovable as everything rushes around him. Maybe that's why she likes him so much.

"Gonna call it a night, Chouji," he says, and she can hear the smirk on his face as he does. That sloppy, lazy smirk that only she would call a smile, because that's as much of a smile as he will ever make. A smile that can, in the space of a few seconds, go from vaguely smug to incredibly dangerous, when he knows he's got you cornered and you know he's got you cornered, and the only thing you can't figure out is how you got cornered in the first place.

"You're sure? It's a new place, just opened up down by Shino's. They're having a grand opening, it's bound to be cheap and plentiful." Chouji stresses the word plentiful like he's reading scripture. An evangelist of gourmandise, and his best friend. A part of her wishes they could tell at least this man why he still hadn't shacked up with any Konoha girls after all these years.

A commotion tumbles through the street below, rippling through the crowd as people stumble into each other, shoving, dropping bags, spilling bowls. Someone's being derided for being an incredible dolt, and a clumsy one at that.

"Hey, Naruto," says a woman's voice that has to be Ten Ten's, embarrassed and amused simultaneously.

She can't help but laugh out loud, a pleasant, alto chuckle that has a barely hidden razor of mockery. Most of the time, that razor comes right out of the sheath, but for now, she is genuinely amused. Some things never change, even years later.

"Aw, c'mon," the voice that must be Naruto grumbles, "Hinata was supposed to be coming tonight, too. And Lee! Don't tell me this lazy bum is gonna go to sleep already?"

She can hear him sigh, frustrated, irked. Annoyed, but in a more amiable way. Clearly, Naruto missed some earlier discussion.

"I'd love to hang out with you guys, some other time. Sorry to hear Hinata and Lee bailed already." He's giving that smirk now, and they've all known him long enough to know why he's lying. They don't mind, they see what's underneath, and what's underneath that. For all of them, lying is tantamount to telling the truth.

"Alright," accedes another voice, higher, clearer, feminine. "Take care of yourself, Shika. Get some rest."

Fat chance, she thinks, smiling to herself, listening to the chaotic chiming of his keys as he fiddles for the lock.

"Thanks, Ino. You too."

"Yeah, you look terrible. You sure you don't need a checkup?"

"I'll be fine, Sakura. Say hi to Neji for me, guys, if he decides to show."

Of course, if he wanted, he could be up here in a second. But he isn't going to. She can imagine him stretching, rubbing the kinks out of his neck. She knows he knows she's there, but he's taking his time. Dragging it out, for no reason other than that is who he is.

She hates waiting, and he knows it. Damn him.

OoOoOoO

Behind his turtle mask, the Anbu forward scout feels miles away, detached, unfeeling. It's strange, how effective the mask is at hiding who he truly is. As soon as it comes down, the rules of social niceties are disengaged, and the silence of the technique consumes everything. The technique is perfect, he made it perfect, hammering it into his body like a sword-smith hammers rare earth into a molten blade, honing and strengthening it until it is unbreakable and balanced like no other.

He falls into the moment, grey cloak resting loosely on his shoulders, breeze on his outstretched fingers. The heat from the fire warms him, and a bead of sweat rolls down from his elbow, disappearing somewhere en route.

The man who stands before him is armed, and well. He won't go down as easily as his opponent, even if that wind does assist him this time. For one thing, he recognizes the wind from somewhere long ago, but he can't place it right now. The scout doesn't care, focusing on his opponent. This one is smarter, certainly, than his fellow, and older. More experienced. Maybe even more than the scout himself. He wonders, idly, if his fighting technique will match.

There are no nice guys here. Not now, not for these men. They don't understand honor, chivalry...they wouldn't understand. Maybe when he's done his duty, when he starts teaching. When the mask comes off, he will be a nice guy again.

And then they truly meet, as warriors, for the first time. He steps into the swing of the blade, noting the unsurprised stretch of his opponent's eyebrow as he interrupts its deadly path by blocking the man's wrist with his upraised arm, a clang echoing from the metal plate beneath his cloak. His other fist is already inbound towards the man, but it connects with a chunk of wood teleported in from elsewhere as the missing Mist ninja vanishes.

He decides now would be a good time to vanish himself. And so, he jumps into the air, concealing his landing in the tall grass with a cat's grace and unerring skill. He is a master of the basics, needs no jutsu to do what everyone else can. He is truly a ninja. And now he begins his search. Seeking, hunting, searching, with his ears and his eyes, as only a ninja knows how.

And then he finds his captain. Losing.

The bandaged Hyuuga is fast, too fast, too sudden, too accurate with his open-palmed chakra killing technique. Too sure and too quick. Still, the captain is no slouch, his arms and legs flying in at seemingly awkward moments, blocking the charkra-charged palms with the cold iron in his hands, slashing at the pointed finger strikes, forcing the Hyuuga to pause, to start again. He's chewing through his own chakra at an unbelievable rate to counter his opponent's precision, to buy time. But if their spotter doesn't make it there on time to finish it, things are going to fall apart. He can feel their captain getting tired.

He wants to step in. Wants desperately to go for the rescue. But he trusts the plan. He trusts the contingencies. He trusts the guy getting the shit kicked out of him.

And then he spots her, the spotter, in her cat mask, whiskers painted on in thin red lines, flickering in the light of the fire as she races past. Suddenly everything is okay again, and it's just him and the man with the sword, circling each other on the far side of the clearing. Technique on technique.

At least until the missing inhabitant of the house bursts out of the ground in front of the petite cat-masked Anbu, blocking her path with fists of stone. As the sword rushes past his face, nicking the white enamel of the turtle's beak, he realizes he can't afford to be distracted. She can handle it, he thinks.

Hopefully fast enough for the captain to extricate himself.

OoOoOoO

She stays still, on the balcony. Forcing herself to stay still. He's coming, and he's taking his sweet time. She knows he's enjoying this weird game of cat and mouse. His brain, his glorious brain is probably trying to figure out why she's waiting up here, why she's waiting at all. It's so uncharacteristically unlike her, but he figures she has a reason.

He's wrong, if he thinks she knows what it is.

Below her, amidst the riot of swirling colour and never-ending movement of people caught in the endless parade of flash and noise, a single man exits the throng, exits the world. The door below closes, clicks, and she realizes she can't hear his footsteps on the stairs, because now he's inside.

That's why she's up here. Enough of the world. Enough of the stage that is the world, and screw all the players that dance on that stage. Time to sit back in the audience. Time to settle into a comfortable chair and watch the world unfold with her lover as the curtains rise.

Don't think about life. Don't think about the death that is so wound up, so caught up in her way of life. Don't think about the way it could all end tomorrow. All it would take is one word, one stupid, idiotic word, from the mouth of some jackass somewhere that doesn't even know she exists or know why she is important to make her life a living hell.

Don't think about that. Don't think about the corpses, piled high by the gravedigger's shovel that is the fan she hauls around with her everywhere. Don't think about the friends, compatriots, ninjas...don't think about the warriors who stood beside her and don't any more. Don't think about the flow, the zone, the uncaring technique that consumes her when the shit starts happening.

Don't think about the kages, the jounin, the chuunin, the genin, all sacrificed to the glories of nations that all deny they exist and quietly turn their tools against each other. Don't think about the smarmy politicians and the suckups who could ruin everything that she is. Don't think about how they already have. Don't think when you don't have to.

Because he doesn't.

Don't worry.

Damn him and his lazy, dangerous, beautiful smile.

OoOoOoO

Pain, incredible, searing, agonizing pain lances through his leg as one of the self-exiled Hyuuga's strikes hit home. He tumbles once, wheeling through the wet grass. If it weren't for that damn byakugan, he'd have had a shadow clone do the fighting for him, while he sat back in a tree and played his game like he preferred, from behind the board.

Hell, if it weren't for that byakugan, he'd have shadow-copied the bastard already, freezing him in his tracks. Not the lethal, strangling version of the same, this offender was too strong for that. He doubted he could hold someone this strong for any more than a handful of seconds...but he'd have grabbed him long enough for his companions to land a death blow. But the missing Hyuuga would see it coming a mile away, with his omniscient byakugan. Too bad his companions were scattered, his forward scout dealing with an extra, unanticipated threat, and his spotter being blocked by the brute that had suddenly rushed up out of his hiding place in the ground. He needs more time.

He steadies himself, rolling onto his back as he realizes there is definitely something wrong with his leg. He knows he could still stand on it, but he's weaker. Much weaker. No way he can do anything too useful with it. Looking up through the eye slits just under the bifurcated horns on his deer-faced mask, he watches as the shrouded man descends on him, palm down. In that frozen moment of time, he can sense the pulse of exiting chakra from those fingers, that menacing point heading straight for locus of the mythical third eye in his forehead. There's no escaping that death blow.

One more second, he thinks, grinning with premeditated malice behind his mask.

The Hyuuga's hand slams into his head, pulverizing the stone that suddenly replaces it.

"Ha!" gargles that twisted, cruel voice, "there is no running from the all seeing eye!"

It's true, he thinks, from his new position behind a tree at the edge of the forest, but you're still fixated on me. There's a difference between seeing and paying attention.

An explosion rips through the clearing, on par with the one that nearly leveled the meeting house...only this time the epicentre is an explosive, chakra-activated enchantment that had been stuck to the rock the Anbu captain had swapped for himself. He allows himself a single chuckle as the bloodied fugitive is knocked flat by the blast, then spins out from behind a tree, his kunai already leaving his fingers. He is rewarded by a growl, as at least one of them finds its target, injuring his opponent. Tit for tat.

Damn his stupid leg. He can't run nearly as fast as he'd like right now. And where the hell is his backup? He needs time to think, but he hasn't got any. Gotta think. Gotta think on the run. Gotta think on the fly.

Gotta think like Temari now.

OoOoOoO

Her mind is jolted back to reality by the muffled sound of a key turning in a lock. She was listening to music coming from up the street, a band of some sort, an impromptu concert put on by musical hopefuls looking to expand their fan base. She saw them on the way in, cases open, all smiles, all cheer, the expectation of charitable reward lighting their faces.

Where she comes from, it's not like this. Not all the time, no. There is a quiet dignity, an enlightened solitude that pervades everything with the wisdom that the strong survive, and the weak die. She comes from a place where the wind will bury you in sand if you don't claw your way free every day. If you don't dig your way out.

A place where Darwinism in the purest sense pushed her to be good, better, best, at what she did. She'd never rival Gaara's insensate power, or Kankouro's cruel mastery, but she had more brains than either of them, and she knew it. Good thing she knew how to put them to use, too, or she would have been buried under that metaphorical sand dune long, long ago.

And then she met this son of a bitch. This weakling, who could barely hold his admittedly impressive technique for more than a couple of minutes at a time. Who somehow, somehow managed to outthink and outdo her. He had a patience and a depth of calculation that clearly outclassed hers.

She'd still needed to rescue his sorry ass, later. She wasn't sure if that made them even, because it didn't mean she was any smarter than he was.

She lifts her head, as the door inside swings slowly open. She watches him as he peruses, indolently, through the mail scattered on the floor. Steady fingers picking through the envelopes, checking addresses and names. His fingers quicken slightly, moving with a precision born of thousands of matches played with small wooden pieces, gathering the two or three letters he might actually bother to read later, the ones which aren't bills or reminders from his mother to do his laundry again. These he tosses across the room with uncanny accuracy to land on his low table. She wonders if one of them is hers.

He kicks off his sandals, leaving them by the door, then shrugs out of the green vest all the Konoha ninjas wear, letting it sag heavily to the floor with a crash and a tinkle that spoke of all the weapons and tools hidden in its myriad pockets.

He's still pretending not to notice her, she thinks, grinning. She knows one of them will give in sooner or later, but she isn't going to give in this time. He will soon, but not yet. She'd make him come to her.

He shambles into the kitchen, opening the fridge door not more than enough to withdraw a can -- two cans of beer. After letting the fridge close on its own, he transfers one can to his free hand, and cracks them both open simultaneously as he walks to the window. Her curving silhouette carves an unmistakable line against the neon, with her four aggressive, willowy blond pony-tails, and a fan large enough to cool hell with. It'd take a bitch like her to do it, too, he thinks, sniggering to himself, admiring the out-thrust hip said fan was resting on.

There was that damn smile again, she thinks. He must know what it does to her, because it deepens.

"Hey, you lazy bum," she says through the glass, leaning against her folded fan, staring at him. When did he get that scar?

"Hey, you troublesome bitch," he says back at her, trying not to drop into those glowing green cat's eyes and failing miserably. "Enjoying yourself?"

"Somewhat. You gonna let me in?"

"Hands are full," he retorts, smirking irascibly. "It's unlocked, besides. Want one?"

Damn him. He's winning again, with that dangerous smile of his.

OoOoOoO

The spotter is already in motion the instant she sees the hulking monstrosity burrow out of the ground in front of her. Her hands flash through an intricate series of poses, seals that would unlock the latent genjutsu she'd been whispering on her approach. She'd seen the bastard even before he leapt out of the soil, covered in his gravelly armour of sand and stone.

From his point of view, he is suddenly entangled, a tree sprouting out of the ground underneath him faster than he knew was possible, faster than almost anything he'd ever encountered before. He is stuck, bound fast, bound firm by this impossible vegetation that coils around his massive legs and clings to him with thorns.

He is no stranger to tricks like this, though, and he tries dispelling it, focusing his consciousness on the internal flow of chakra to his brain. Too late. Her tiny, slender form shoots out from within the tree, and with a style far too similar to the exiled Hyuuga's, she stabs at his neck, his arms, his torso with fingers and palms.

For her, it is an exercise in frustration. She'd bound him, if only long enough to get close, inside of his reach, only to find the chakra-bound armour he'd built up during his sojourn underground was too thick for her strikes to penetrate. She isn't strong enough to break it, not on her own, and the advance scout is clearly occupied.

In the distance, she sees him shoot away from an undeniably powerful sword technique that nicks his arm before darting in again and punishing his opponent with a solid knee to the jaw.

But fast as he is, he doesn't have the time to finish his own opponent and break this man's protection. Not before she was either killed or delayed long enough to ensure that their leader was. To put some emphasis on that point, the earthen brute slams his impossibly fast fist down into her face mask, shattering the enamel, turning it to shrapnel even as she swaps herself for a small log. His big, stony mouth creases in a mockery of a smile, and he motions to his own friend to join him in destroying this little girl playing at dress-up in her kitty Anbu mask. The smile fades when he realizes she is wearing her Konoha head protector over her eyes. She should be blind. Hyuuga Hinata, on the other hand, doesn't need to worry about that. No Hyuuga did, and she habitually wears the metal plate over her eyes, under the mask, to hide that she is one of them too.

And...she still has one ace in the hole. The second inhabitant of the house wasn't a missing sand ninja, but an actual sand ninja, revealed to her by her own omniscient byakugan. A really good one, hiding in an illusion that made her a clone of the the ally her opponent can't seem to find.

Just then, the brute sees Temari, too, standing on the wreckage of the house, back to the flames, her fan wide open, a translucent screen against the flickering fire. Hinata dances backwards, and then the typhoon hits. Hurricane-force winds slam into her assailant mid-step, shoving him off balance, and tearing away a good half of his armour. Pebbles and sand howl off into the blackened sky, adding stars to an already full panorama.

"Mine," Hinata whispers, softly, dashing in to deliver her feather-touch deathblow. In the background, the forward scout grabs the swordsman by the face, and plows his head into the ground with enough force to send a cone of dirt clods skyward. For them, it is over.

Temari is winding up for another massive blow, this time against the bandage-wrapped Hyuuga traitor.

OoOoOoO

Rolling her eyes, Temari slides the glass panel open. He takes a step back, letting her into his shadowy lair. She wonders if he ever turns the lights on in here, except for that lamp he uses to read. After all, Shikamaru is the inheritor of the shadow, and one of its creatures. She kicks off her sandals, too, and shrugs off her massive, unconventional weapon, closing the door behind her.

She exits the world.

In exchange, he offers her the untouched can, which she grudgingly accepts. Trust him to use something so ridiculously simple to win. The beer is...not her favorite; he wasn't expecting her this week. She wants something darker, richer, bitterer, but it'll do for now. She's in a kind of celebratory mood anyway.

"So," he says, his smirk pretty undeniably smug, "what brings you here?"

She shrugs. "Captured his buddy a couple weeks back. Kankouro tortured it out of him that they were going to buy the secret of the byakugan off of some guy. So, we notified your village. And I went out to do some snooping."

"Simple as that?" It had to be Temari, of course. Everything was under control this time, almost. Not like the last time she walked in on one of his fights. But he was younger then, weaker. He would have had to retreat, if not for her.

Enough, he wasn't going to dwell on it.

"Simple as that. 'Course, I did even the odds for you, and you were getting your ass righteously kicked." Temari snickers, that enchanting, mocking laugh that scares and excites him at the same time. He raises a smooth, thin eyebrow at her comment. In the meantime, the open, low-cut shoulder of her tunic is starting to slip, exposing more and more of the dark mesh sleeves she wears under it.

He knows she knows it's slipping, knows she knows he can see the cloth bindings around her chest. This is the game they play. It slides further, as she leans back, taking a longer drag on her beer.

"Should I be thanking you?"

"Well, I did punch him in the face," she laughs. "You know, it's been a while since I was here. Care to explain that to me?" she asks, falsely curious, pointing her one index finger at the rotating platform mounted on his low desk, all while keeping her beer firmly in the same hand.

"You already know," he says, taking his turn to roll his eyes. Her tunic slips further down her arm as they both lean back against the cool glass. It's most of the way to her elbow now, and she catches him looking just as he glances away.

"Because you're too damn lazy to walk around to the other side of the board so you had to get a turntable," she laughs, swinging at him with her mockery. She loves it.

"You're such a pain in the ass, you know that?"

"And you love it," she says. She knows he does, because he's the one who finally comes to her, putting down his beer and gently brushing his lips against hers. He drapes an arm over her shoulder, running his hand through a gauntlet of untidy ponytails as he does so. On the opposite side, he gently pushes down the loose sleeve of her tunic, freeing her arm. Freeing her shoulder, exposing her slowly, meticulously. She bends slightly, dropping her can to the floor. It was nearly done, anyway.

As soon as her arm is free, she reaches up with both hands to grab his shirt and she attacks him with her incorrigible lips as she slams him up against the glass with her entire body in the pink light of the neon sign across the street.

"You impatient woman," he murmurs into the kiss, as she grabs a handful of his black hair. But he misses her, so it scarcely means anything.

OoOoOoO

Temari's storm takes off like a rocket preparing for launch. A low growl, a rumble, and then a shockwave of pure force lunges out at the supposedly unsuspecting Hyuuga exile. The Hyuuga says something, but his gravelly voice is lost in the storm as he executes his kaiten for the second time that night.

He does something Temari has never seen before. He's cutting through her blast, a whirlwind within a whirlwind. He's using her blast to accelerate his spin, to perfect his defense even further...and he's coming towards her.

In an instant, she's folded her fan into a long, hard bar, and she swings it into a defensive posture. Too late, though, as the Hyuuga reaches out, over the top of folded fan, and she feels light touches against the sides of her neck.

Her world spontaneously goes cold, and her balance is all wrong. Where's the ground? She has no idea. Her feet are...not attached to her brain any more, somehow. Her hands, she needs to use her hands to stop her fall, she needs her hands to do something, anything, she can't find her hands, shit, shit, shit, shit.

Pain stabs through her neck, rushing from the base of her spine all the way up into her brainstem and it's all she can do to stay awake and conscious. She's vaguely aware of the Hyuuga standing over her, gloating. The bandages are splotchier now, bloodier, and wetter. He's exerting himself, but that doesn't matter since she's going to be dead in about two seconds as he brings his arm back, cocking it, to finish her.

And then there's a flash, and she's upright and her fist is buried in that bloodied, bandaged mass her enemy once called his face...

The deer-masked Anbu captain is standing, with his fist outstretched. Behind him, a kunai with a flare enchantment is embedded in a tree. And his shadow, his impossibly long, blessed shadow had somehow rushed right past the Hyuuga at the speed of dark to her feet. They are joined. His fist is hers. And her fist is in the monster's face, quivering with his exertion as the traitor begins to fall backwards from the blow.

A second later, the Anbu's shadow has switched to the disoriented Hyuuga, trapping him, when Hinata comes sprinting up the rubble, singing something about sixty four palms in a high soprano. According to his plan.

And when she stops, the exile is lying on his back, unmoving, as the turtle-masked Anbu catches up to them, panting. Hinata kneels down next to their target, and gingerly unwraps the bandages around his face and head. Disgusting is not a sufficient word, as unhealed meat peels away with the bandages, macerated beyond compare. He's breathing shallowly, his white-irised eyes staring blankly up at them from a face that no longer has eyelids. He'd fought his cursed seal, and if it couldn't have his brain, then it would take his flesh instead.

As she exposes him, Shikamaru lifts the deer mask from his face, and Rock Lee follows suit with his own scratched turtle mask.

Hinata's delicate brows scrunch together above the headband covering her eyes in a fury Shikamaru had never seen in the once-timid girl.

"It's him," she mutters, her tone morbidly sad. "He's the one."

Shikamaru and Rock Lee nod once to each other, then finish their victim with the kunai that would destroy his entire body and his belongings. This man, this ex-Hyuuga, had, against all odds, assassinated Hyuuga Hiashi and taken his eyes for sale to the highest bidder. Hinata might never know the reason why, but it didn't matter any more. She'd already forgiven her father, forgiven everyone who didn't have the patience to watch her become a woman.

Before they leave, she reverses the damage Shikamaru and Temari had taken with her intimate knowledge of how it had happened, and helps Lee bandage his own wounds. And then they quietly incinerate the clearing and all the corpses, before heading off into the night.

OoOoOoO

Afterwards, they lie there, wallowing in that blend of shadows and the never-ending pink light, listening to the hum of people beyond the glass door and quietly enjoying the mutual vulnerability of their nakedness. The game was over.

"You'll be back, eh?" he asks, absently, the stockpiled desire set aside -- they lust for each other's minds now, the verbal sparring that invariably colours their every encounter.

"Yeah," she grins, showing the predator smile that had scared him so much, before they'd really fallen for each other. She scores the first point for the next match.

Somehow, neither knew anymore who'd won. It didn't matter, and they'd lost track of the score somewhere between the kisses and caresses, the sweat and the sex. The score always got lost, somewhere between them when they were pressed together, and neither of them really cares who wins anyway.

Because every time she pushed him off balance and he had to start thinking all over again, and every time he pushed her off her rhythm and she had to stop thinking at all, they secretly scored points.

It just happens far too often for it to matter any more.

Doesn't mean the game isn't fun to play, though, she thinks, staring into his black eyes as she slides closer to kiss him more gently than she has all evening.

OoOoOoO

Author's Notes:

So I read a lot of Naruto ff this weekend, for no reason other than being bored. It put some dumb ideas in my head, ideas what needed fixing. This is the end result. Not sure why I like the idea of Temari and Shikamaru having some kind of forbidden romance, but I do. This is how it works in my mind, and I think it works pretty well. Shikamaru is apathetic, yes, but I doubt he'd let himself get pushed around where it counted. Temari is strong-willed, conversely, but I think she wants to break free sometimes, too.

Hinata, I think, gets the short end of the stick from everyone (admittedly, I've only ever read the manga). To me, she is struggling with confidence issues and expectations that are patently unrealistic for a child her age, much like Sasuke. Sure, Neji's a genius with his skill, but that also makes him vulnerable to overspecialization. For this, I assumed that Hinata would discover a talent for genjutsu as well, and pick up from Yuuhi Kurenai some of the genjutsu I have her use here. Furthermore, I think Hinata's subtle, quiet revenge works well here -- she's a powerful ninja now, and I think that alone might have been enough to force her father to recognize her in some way before I killed him off.

As for Lee, I think he is incredibly optimistic for someone whose job it is to kill people, or whose job it will be to kill people. As of yet, he hasn't had to, but I think it would be like this. Maito Gai strikes me as over-compensating for some kind of sadness or remorse over things he has had to do, but you'll notice he hasn't hesitated to kill anyone when necessary. Lee, I think, will follow him there.

I didn't name anyone so long as they were wearing their Anbu masks, because that's what the masks do, they anonymize. I think, in a way, the masks help the Anbu do their jobs, too, by distancing them like it does for Lee.

No, that isn't Neji, although it could have been if I didn't think he had the ability to rise above his arrogant hatred. Dude's too cool.


	2. Cheaters Never Prosper::The Game

The Fire Country's capital city is suffused with a tiger-lily orange, the cheerfully saccharine hue slathered on every facade and edifice by the outstretched arms of a dying sun. It's the end of a brutally humid day, and Ino has found it nearly impossible to breathe. The heat is oppressive, crushing her as she sits cross-legged at a tiny round table on the patio of a small but fashionably unnoticed cafe. Her fingers are sticking to the plastic lamination of the heavily overpriced menu, and she tries not to notice too much.

It still bothers her.

She feels strangely uncomfortable out in public, in this city. It's too...civilian. She misses the familiar bulk of her drab green flak jacket, the comforting weight of the kunai and her other tools. Without them pressing down on her, she feels too light, too awkward, and too vulnerable. Aimlessly, her hand wanders up to her forehead, brushing away a loose strand of her long blonde hair that has drifted over her pair of dark but delicately framed sunglasses, tucking it casually behind her ear.

There is something awkward about hiding in plain view to her, even after years of practice, of blending in. She'd much sooner be hiding in a tree, or a bush, enshrouded in leaves, dappled in shadow, but there is virtually no vegetation here, and what few trees there are are narrow and sickly, and do not afford any respectable cover. Out in the street is a vast, faceless crowd of pedestrians, all occupied with their own lives, and disappearing into the throng would be the easiest thing for her to do, but impossible since she is waiting.

She glances up, verifying for herself what her peripheral vision has told her, and she catches two men at another table glance away quickly, embarrassed at being found out. She smirks inwardly, to herself, condemning them for not having the balls to at least be honest about their leering. She tries to be inconspicuous, but she is undeniably beautiful, which makes it difficult to blend in. Her face is set in a tableau of studied boredom, letting everyone know the blonde goddess isn't waiting for anyone, but she's not taking applications at this time. Too bad for them.

The page makes an odd sound as she turns the leaf, moving on from the appetizers to the entrees with deliberate slowness. It's late for dinner, but who cares? She is comfortably, casually clad, the gray folds of her expansive collar bunched loosely around her neck. A crumpled backpack lies on the ground beside her, suggesting perhaps that she is a student, or perhaps even a tourist, but conceals a bundle of summoning scrolls and a handful of heavy kunai. A thin-stemmed glass of dark red wine casts a long, variegated bruise on the table cloth and an unfinished novel with a maroon bookmark, completing the image of a woman taking her time to enjoy what solitude she can away from her own personal rat race.

She glances from one page to the next, her long ponytail dancing sinuously across her back as she does so. She's not sure if she likes this restaurant yet. The food is a little pricey for her tastes, and not sufficiently sophisticated to justify the extraneous expense. Still, she thinks, idly grasping her glass and reveling in the cool condensation it imparts to her fingers, she's not paying for it, so it doesn't really matter. Maybe she'll get something chocolate for dessert, she thinks, something grotesquely sinful, just for her.

A wry grin threatens to crawl up onto her lips, and she wrestles it down after some deliberation. Yeah, maybe she will, she concludes, drinking in the sparkles of the falling sunset on her wine with her eyes before she looks around again.

Besides the two terrified but aroused men she'd caught out earlier, the restaurant is full. Most of the tables have finished their meals and are having conversations over tea, like the bald-headed businessman and his associate behind her discussing some new import fashion. A family celebrates an occasion, perhaps a birthday or an anniversary. One woman intrigues Ino in particular. She sits alone at a table for two, nervously fingering the edge of the table cloth in one hand while slowly reading and re-reading the menu over and over again. Perhaps she's waiting for someone, some significant other or a blind date?

Across the street, the sun looms large and yellow, banded by interlaced bars of withering clouds, hanging over the shadow-shrouded facade of the opposing hotel like a paranoid, cyclopean eye. She doesn't sit facing it, but at a slight angle, unlike most of the other patrons, who face away, avoiding its brilliant glare. If anyone is obnoxious enough to bother her and ask why, she'll reply that she likes watching the people on the street, who pass by busily, ignoring each other. She'll follow with any one of her standard retorts, unless something really creative strikes her fancy.

On her first visit to this city, she couldn't figure it out...this place is too different from the friendly, interconnected community that is Konoha. This place is too big, too impersonal, too conforming. The streets are laid out in a perfect grid, not the awkward, winding passages of her home town. It's eerily quiet, for all the people rushing around, because none of them are talking to each other.

Just like she had decided on her first visit, she just wasn't a big city girl, and nothing had changed.

OoOoOoO

The first thing Ino realizes when she drags herself out of bed is that she doesn't remember how she got into bed in the first place. Something about losing her keys, finding them, and then losing them. The walk from the front door to her bedroom is part blur, part induced amnesia.

With some trepidation, she swats at the lily-white bedding crumpled around her feet, ensnaring her legs together. When it becomes obvious that she'd somehow managed to use her sandal-bound feet to tie knots in her sheets while she was sleeping, she twists at the waist, reaching down to undo the damage with stiff, unresponsive fingers. Eventually, she manages to free herself. With no small degree of apathy, she gets her sandals off and chucks them at the doorway to her bedroom, promising herself she'll get them later and move them to where they're supposed to be by the front door of her modest apartment. Her mouth tastes like the end of the world, a global conflagration of ash and smoke, and she hopes she didn't puke.

The second thing she realizes, in the process of standing, is that she is far too hung over to be allowed to stay in a standing position. She must be dehydrated, she thinks, because this is the almost the worst its ever been. The last time her morning-after headache was this terrible was immediately following her jounin promotion celebration. She still doesn't remember what happened that night, at all, except for the fact that she woke up vowing never to try drinking Chouji under the table, ever again. From the stories she hears, she spent the night alternately on and under the table herself.

As she stretches, first one lithe, sculpted arm, then the other, she looks around the room. It was pretty drab when she first moved in, but greenery dominates the room, counterpointing the otherwise bland pale yellow walls. A vine twists up the side of her dresser, unopened buds promising tiny white rosettes. On her night stand, a pot of pale violet mums shelters her tiny radio set. A riot of colour bursts inward through the glass pane by her bed, staged from a window box loaded with noisome impatiens.

The water takes a while to warm up, and she crumples onto the lid of the toilet and pulls off her sweater while the memories rush back to her, and a third realization hits her. There's no longer any point trying to drink Sakura under the table either, she muses grimly. Sakura must have learned something from a fellow medical ninja -- maybe even her mentor, Lady Tsunade -- about detoxification, because the grin her friend and one-time rival had been wearing all night was nothing short of malicious.

But there have been too many mornings like these, recently.

Shaking her head, she steps into the shower, letting the water wash everything away as it flows over her closed eyelids and beads off the point of her chin.

OoOoOoO

With a studied precision, Ino closes the menu, depositing it noiselessly on the taut serge tablecloth, unconsciously leaving it at a right angle to the set of cutlery that lies unwrapped at her right hand. The sun is still descending, vanishing, the shadows lengthening, consuming everything before them. Night is falling.

Directly above her, a waxing crescent moon hangs in the balance, static in a darkening sky, brightening by contrast. Pocked by the eons, it stands scarred watch over the cooling evening. The sky around it is indigo, fading across a long gradient into brilliant reds and pinks, smoky purple clouds counterpointing in their steadfast transit across the meridian.

The small, thin trees grow in olive rows at the street's edge, denied a chance to reach skyward by the concrete limitations at their roots. Still, they glow softly in the dusk, their dry, ochre-tinted leaves unmoving in the still air, and cast mottled felt shadows over the walls and front windows of the cafe, camouflaging its patrons.

The street traffic has started to change, too, no longer dominated by commuters heading home. Elegant and functional briefcases both give way to bulky shopping bags or lightweight travel kits. A man with a long bamboo pole balancing a pair of heavy crates navigates past, plying his way through a human river. The tourists are out in force now, as the attractions close and they begin to gravitate towards the city's nightlife.

Ino watches a couple standing by the patio through her sunglasses. They are wearing more traditional garb than she is sporting, and laughter drifts over to her as they peruse the menu posted outside. From the snippets of their conversation she picks up over the hustle, she understands they are locals out for a stroll, discussing their prospects for a quiet night on the town. They sound like they've been together for a while, and she is silently envious of their casual affection, their disregard for the details of the outside world.

She herself is immersed in the details. She is simultaneously monitoring no fewer than six pedestrians in detail, and is aware of another dozen or so who are suspicious to her. She's also monitoring the ninja standing on the balcony opposite the cafe, because she knows she's going to put him out of a job rather shortly. She has a remarkable sense of observation, honed to second or even first nature by a couple of years in Konoha's espionage department when she was still a chuunin. Her eyes dart surreptitiously, never staying long on any one person, but drinking in every detail. She keeps an eye on herself and anyone who might be behind her by studying reflections in storefronts across the street and in the hotel windows, not to mention surreptitious glances into the mirrored edges of the silverware.

She'd always been afraid she'd end up stuck in espionage on the basis of her family's reputation as excellent spies. After all, the mind-body switch jutsu they practiced and passed down from generation to generation had always been used to gather information, to steal documents, to eavesdrop. It was ideal because it never left evidence -- the victim of the crime became the perpetrator, when a Yamanaka took up temporary residence in their skull.

It was never enough for her. She'd always needed to prove she could do better, be better, without help, and build her own reputation for herself. And so she had, but she wasn't sure yet if she liked where it had gotten her.

Time passes slowly, creeping past as she places her order with her polite but none too attentive waiter, and continues her quiet stakeout of the street. He unobtrusively lights the candle at her table and vanishes into the persistent hum of the restaurant, but she never loses track of exactly where he is until the kitchen doors close behind him.

OoOoOoO

The morning air is crisp and clean in Konoha. The village's economy isn't based on anything as obviously vulgar or ugly as industry, and ensconced as it is in the heart of a massive, ancient forest, it is a pleasantly nice place for all the periodic violence it experiences. Ino is oblivious to this perhaps sobering thought as she drags herself step by step to the back door of the florist's shop where she works on her off days.

She doesn't work here for the money, of course. As a special jounin, she makes more than enough to support herself, sometimes more than she really knows what to do with, once danger pay and any number of other modifiers get worked into her salary. Since it's her mother's store, she refuses to be paid for the time she puts in here. The last time her mother had asked her, she lied and cited some lame reason like filial duty. Her mother doesn't believe her, she knows, but she stopped asking.

Compared to most others of her rank, she performs fewer missions, but the additional bonuses tacked on to her assignments tend to compensate for it. As a result, she ends up with considerably more free time than some of her peers -- and with most of her friends off working out of the city all the time, she finds she needs something to do to keep herself occupied. Besides, it's nice to have a regular place where her friends can find her if they want to chat.

Besides which, with her real job giving her awkward hours and a potential summons at any hour of the day, any day of the week, she'd never find a part-time job anywhere else. The regular workers at the store love her, because they can always call on her for an extra hand if they need it, and they can sic her on customers if they're too busy to deal with daily inanities and the time-consuming foibles of selfish visitors.

She loves the store; even though she is grown now, adult, this was where she grew up, before the academy, before training. She loves the quiet brilliance of the flowers, the unique conditions of care that each species, each finicky plant requires. She loves the feeling of cool earth crumbling beneath her fingertips, the soft, rough, hairy, smooth textures of leaves in her hands. The chaotic, turbulent beauty of hundreds of stems of flowers arranged haphazardly all around her.

She loves the smell.

It's pristine, floral. It screams life, rich in vitality and unconcerned with appearances or performance. She loves being here, because it relaxes her. With all the rest of the unpredictability her life affords her, the simple pleasures of the store she grew up in give her something to hang on to when she feels at her worst, and something to share when she's at her best.

She's pretty sure she's feeling pretty close to her worst right now. The murmur of conversation in the street is resonating in her head far too loudly, even as she passes through the back of the store up to the front room.

"Hey, Ino!"

And that gleeful shout, she thinks, cringing, is bouncing around the inside of her skull like shuriken in a tin can.

"How's the hangover?" Sakura is standing by the front counter, wearing a victor's grin on her face, a fanged, cat-like smile.

OoOoOoO

Ino is nearly done her meal when her target strolls up the avenue, attempting insouciance and performing rather badly. He's discreetly flanked on both sides by hired ninjas, from the Iwa village. They have disguised their appearances with illusionary selves, enough to fool just about any passer-by. She can tell from the way they walk, the soles of their feet brushing the ground noiselessly out of habit. They could be more discreet, more intentionally clumsy, but they aren't expecting trouble from a fellow ninja, not here, not in this unwitting city. Besides which, by advertising their presence, they warn any potential opponent that they will respond with competent force.

She can almost feel their boredom, tempered only by the knowledge that they are on enemy territory while their charge deals with business. Roughly estimating from their level of alertness, and the level of control they're exerting over their chakra output, she guesses that one of the two is a jounin, and the other a chuunin. The one on the balcony, she reminds herself, is probably a chuunin as well.

During the course of her meal, in furtive, innocent glances cast around between bites, she'd identified the man's six bodyguards as well. They're typical for mercenaries, although considerably better groomed. They're bulky, their posture rectangular and goonish, having built up sheer muscle strength without any knowledge of chakra or its use. Their weapons, the ones who carry them, are concealed beneath stifling looking jackets that are entirely out of place on a sweltering afternoon. That alone had made them stand out among the lighter summer fashions as pointedly suspicious.

They should start to feel better now that the sun has gone down and the air is cooling, she thinks, feeling oddly sympathetic for a handful of muscle-bound dunderheads with no real marketable skills.

Her sunglasses are off now, folded demurely on the table, next to her more or less finished meal. She's working now, and her appetite has vanished, sublimated to the concerns of the moment. Nevertheless, she has appearances to keep up, and she continues to eat, albeit at a slower pace. Her pale blue eyes rove along the street, looking for more, and she reaches out mentally, feeling for any other interlopers who might complicate her mission here. She doesn't find any.

She knows nothing about her opposing force. Until today, she wasn't even aware that her opponent had hired any ninjas from another village to protect him -- probably a last minute decision on his part. It leads her to conclude that he is frightened and nervous, paranoid. He's probably paying a lot for such short notice.

Under the too-bright, artificial moonlight of the street lamps, the target and his hired pair of ninjas pass by one of the goons camping out by the hotel's entrance. Her target is tense, she can tell. He's trying too hard to look casual, unable to affect the diffident slouch of his escorts. He walks stiffly, briskly through the elegant entrance of the hotel into the lobby, brusquely and pointedly ignoring the porter who holds the heavy door for him.

He looks like a hunted man.

Funny, she thinks, she doesn't feel like a hunter.

But hunted he is. Her target is a ruthless businessman-lordling by day, bloodthirsty power broker by night. A man who is so absorbed in the hidden, convoluted bureaucracies of the ninja world without being one himself that he has earned infamy in the world of the shadows. He's frequently the middleman in any number of shady deals and he finds no shame in playing the different ninja villages off of each other to further his own ambitions and those of his employers.

Until recently, he's been a pest, tolerated by the villages because he brought in missions, and missions brought in much needed funding. He is a cheater, bending the rules and the words of the contracts that are the lifeblood of every ninja village everywhere.

He must have hired these extra bodyguards when he realized he'd offended the Hyuuga clan more than anyone had in decades. As proud as Ino was of her own clan, the Hyuugas were not to be trifled with. She suspects, somehow, that the Stone ninjas accompanying the man are unaware of this fact. The last time she went on a mission using the information he'd provided, she'd spent two weeks in Konoha's trauma ward recovering.

Tonight, she teaches him that cheaters never prosper.

OoOoOoO

"What time is it, Sakura?" Ino asks, squinting as she slumps onto the front counter, supporting her chin in one hand. The headache is fading, slowly, she's sure, but it still throbs. The three glasses of water she forced down in short order just before heading over are starting to kick in now, and she's just starting to feel a little more like a herself again.

"Something like a quarter past noon," her friend says nonchalantly, running her fingers through her vibrant hair, pausing only to adjust the head protector she wears like a headband. Neither of them carries their village badge correctly; Ino typically wears hers more like a belt. Largely, this was due to an old feud they had tried to resolve at their first attempt to make chuunin. At some point later, they'd realized their competition could never really be resolved properly, they were too good at entirely different things. Still, neither of them had switched to the correct style, quietly acknowledging a mutual respect that they'd denied each other for too long.

Sakura, under Tsunade's mentorship, had found a niche not only as a brutal front-line brawler, but as an accomplished medical ninja above all else, something her superior control of chakra let her do with surprising ease. She was very different now from the vanilla trainee she'd once been. She still kept her hair short where she'd docked it during the chuunin exam ages ago, a memento and a reminder of why she'd done it, of the drive that made her the ninja she was today.

Ino's own niche, conversely, was something entirely different, but just as unexpected. Everyone had expected Ino to serve in espionage for her career, like her father, her uncle, and two of her aunts. The Yamanakas had never really been known for their fighting ability, though no one could deny that Ino was sufficiently competent to hold her own against anyone her rank.

No, Ino had found something slightly...different.

For lack of a better word, she found a place among Konoha's assassins. Men and women who operated alone, often in enemy territory, hunting down and destroying the few who threatened the always fragile peace or the interests of the Fire country. Most assassins had one job, and one job only, to eliminate the target. Sometimes they were given instructions to leave a mess, as a warning to anyone who might try the same offense.

But even that wasn't Ino's specialty. She had a tendency to get picked when the hit needed to be clean, quiet, and unobtrusive. Unsuspicious. Someone in the small fraternity of assassins had unofficially dubbed her 'the Cleaner', because she tidied up messes...especially political ones. Quite a few arrogant politicos and nobles who had tried to overstep their bounds had found themselves on the wrong end of Ino's personal brand of diplomatic expedience.

No evidence; that was the way of the Yamanaka.

Sakura giggles, pushing a chakra filled palm against Ino's bare forehead, purging the grievous headache smoothly, leaving nothing but a tingle and a glow.

"There you go," she says, before leaning on the counter herself, facing the woman who had taught her confidence long ago. "I hope you slept well after last night's fiasco. I hardly get to talk to you any more these days. Oh, and since you slept in, you missed Shikamaru, he left just before you got here." Sakura's voice bubbles non-stop, cheerful, as she brings Ino up to date. Ino's last mission had been apparently long enough for her to fall behind on the latest village gossip, one of her minor vices and guilty pleasures. One which she happens to share with Sakura.

Ino's jaw drops. Shikamaru almost never visited the store, she usually caught him in transit outside the storefront whenever it occurred to him to amble around the city like he sometimes did.

"You're kidding. What was he doing here?"

"Looked like he was carrying a potted cactus, but I'm not sure. It had little purple flowers growing out of it, though. Do cacti flower?" Ino grins. Sakura, in spite of her name, had never really gotten the hang of plants, with the exception of those herbs and sprouts utilized in poisons and their respective antidotes.

"Yeah, they do, depending on the species. We don't have too many cacti here, though, they're pretty expensive for us to import. Still, they're easy to take care of...maybe he figures he's going to try taking care of one and doesn't want to put too much effort into it." Her laughter is lilting. It sounds typical of Shikamaru to do something utterly incomprehensible. Usually there were two possible reasons for anything he did -- sheer laziness or subtle brilliance. In this instance, she wasn't sure what it could possibly be.

"Yeah, you're probably right," Sakura responds, dissolving into her own laughter. "It's hard seeing him getting sentimental about anything. I can't see it."

Ino waves off the comment with the back of her hand. "Eh, you just don't know him well enough. He cares, but he can't be bothered to let anybody know."

"Maybe it's for a girl," Sakura muses, absently.

"Yeah, real romantic, Shika. A cactus." The store rings with their snide chuckling. Day's looking up so far, she thinks.

OoOoOoO

From her post on the restaurant's patio, Ino finds her target's room on the front facade of the building, third from the right on the second floor. The chuunin has left the balcony, erroneously satisfied that nothing is amiss for the moment. Silently, the lanky ninja enters the room, sliding the door shut and locking it as he does so. While the guardian ninja gives away the room's location much as a flare would, Ino had already known which room was the target's owing to a little discrete detective work.

She waits, picking at the remains of her meal until the target appears in the window, discussing something with his bodyguards. The man is portly, almost rotund. If not for the cruel intensity of his face, he might have appeared harmless. As things stand, though, he is florid, overheated from the wretched heat of the day, giving him the appearance of one who is always angry. His black hair, slicked straight back in adherence with the most recent style among nobles, is severe, projecting an arrogance and haughtiness no longer found in his dark, frightened eyes. His hand rests uneasily on the hilts of his swords, swords of honor he does not deserve to carry, but does anyway. He must know he is marked now.

He lifts his nose, as though passing judgment on the throng below his balcony, but she can see him quiver, like a rat sniffing for a tabby.

Ino loses her line of sight momentarily as the waiter retrieves her plate and offers her a drink or the dessert menu. Politely, she asks for both, and unfolds her novel, folding back the cover and the first hundred or so pages, leaving it nearly flat on the table. It's an old book, one she's read countless times from cover to cover, but it's a habit she likes to keep on missions like these.

Besides which, the book is letting the waiter know that she will be taking her time with her after-dinner rituals. With any luck, he'll leave her be, at least long enough for her to deal with the matter at hand.

Her mission today was commissioned by the Hyuuga clan's elders in the interim absence of a house head. Ever since Hyuuga Hiashi had been murdered by his arguably insane second cousin Toyama, the clan had initiated a manhunt of a scale unseen since the Uchiha's fall. Anyone who knew anything about Toyama or his whereabouts had been tracked down and interrogated...where possible. A few unfortunate souls had tried to run or resist, and had been terminated with the considerable efficiency of the best that one could possibly hire from Konoha. Toyama, it was rumored, was being personally hunted by the clan heir.

In her case, this arrogant middleman had been responsible for arranging a meeting between some missing sand ninjas and Toyama regarding the sale of at least one of Hiashi's eyes. Presumably, they would have used this knowledge to duplicate the legendary byakugan themselves, and with such a remarkable sample to work with, there could be no doubt it might have worked.

At this time, no one knows if Toyama had both eyes with him, but it is a risk the Hyuugas are unwilling to take. They didn't even know if her target today knows anything more regarding the deal besides the players involved, but he had participated, so they didn't care. He needed to be removed.

Still, the man is a minor noble, and with some political weight in the Land of Earth. Outright assassinating him would not go over well, and had the potential to become the kind of destabilizing international incident that the village worked to avoid -- especially considering how unsteady things had become regarding trade rights and a long-stagnant border dispute that is only now picking up momentum.

War, it seems, is always around the corner. Mostly due to men like these.

No pressure, she thinks, smirking ironically to herself, as she finds the man again, his back to the balcony window. The chuunin she'd seen earlier stands behind him, shielding him from projectiles with his own body.

Linking her thumbs and forefingers together, she secretly forms the required seal for her family's infamous technique, and then stretches extravagantly. Her arms lift away from the table, long and pale under the street lamp's actinic gaze, and pass up over her head, freezing there as she dramatizes a yawn.

But the jutsu is already activated, undetectable, her mind leaving her body and flitting across the street, incorporeal. She is vaguely aware of her body slumping into a prepared position, with her elbows on either side of her book, supporting her limp body. To a casual observer, she is immersed in the text, absorbed by the intricacies of its prose and a prisoner to the story.

Her body is an empty shell.

Her ghost, however, is tense. If her target moves too much, or if the ninja completely blocks her line of sight, she'll have to start again, in five minutes or so. And in that time, her mind would be left to wander, incorporeal, until her body was ready to take her back. She hopes the ninjas are still just as unwitting as they were earlier; it wouldn't do to have them attack her now.

This is why she...dislikes these solo missions. She wants the security of knowing that someone will be there to back her up. She misses the days when she could launch into her cerebral strike, secure in the knowledge that Shikamaru's brain and Chouji's brawn were there to protect her, two amiable, shielding spirits that would keep her safe while she worked.

She misses, also, their company. Alone, in the field, she has no one to talk to, or talk at, in Shika's awkward case. At least Chouji knew how to carry on a conversation without being snide, but she'd come to appreciate the incisive commentary Shikamaru might make if a topic that piqued his interest happened to come up. Not for the first time, she realizes that she is lonely, in this incorporeal moment as her ghost self crosses the moat of humanity in the street below her.

Seconds pass like hours.

And then she finds herself, a hijacker behind a stranger's eyes, listening with ears that are not her own, familiarizing herself with a body too awkwardly heavy and disgusting for her tastes, although pleasantly wrapped in black silk. She suppresses the shudder as the tail end of the conversation reaches her consciousness.

"...so do you need anything else for now? Otherwise I'm going to secure the room."

That must be one of the stone ninjas. When she answers, her voice is gruff, slurred by unresponsive lips.

"No," she makes him say, curtly. He doesn't look the type for manners. "Leave me," her unnatural puppet utters, explaining. "I have some unfinished, private business to attend to."

She has him stay still by the corner of the desk, watching as the ninjas close the shutters and file out. When the door finally closes, she knows she has approximately four minutes to do what she's here to do. But that aside?

The Cleaner takes over. The Cheater is about to lose.

OoOoOoO

"...so then I overheard Kurenai say that Shino's actually getting married -- I didn't even know he was seeing anyone," Sakura says, recounting a conversation between the man that had once led her team and said kunoichi.

Ino gasps, for good measure.

"You're kidding. Anyone we know?"

"No, don't think so. Apparently she attended the Academy for a year or two before dropping out. Shino used to be friends with her, and then they met up again not too long ago."

"Wow. Go figure; Shino gets married, and Shika buys flowers. The world must be ending."

Sakura grins. "Anyway, my lunch break is over," she sighs, tossing her leftovers into her lunch bag. "I have to get back to the hospital. Hope you're feeling better."

They say their goodbyes with the casual familiarity that only old friends can share, and Ino returns her attention, most of it, to an arrangement sitting on the counter in front of her. Idly, she twirls a cosmos in one hand, trying to find a good place to put it, reveling in its sweet scent.

The news about Shino is a little earth-shaking, to be sure. The man rarely spoke, if ever, and was so steeped in the reticent way of the ninja it was hard to believe that he had taken such a drastic step off of the path, let alone found the time to do so. Furthermore, it punctuates her own condition: single. Even Chouji has on-and-off girlfriends these days, women drawn by his stoic pride, but the power projected in his strut. He was truly his father's son, a man proud of his bulk, of his strength, and the massive endurance represented therein.

The thing was, it wasn't that she'd never had a relationship. She had tried, several times before falling into her current drought. There just wasn't anyone who could keep up with her. More than once, she'd had to deal with jealous boyfriends who couldn't fathom that her job meant she wasn't always home at night, and that being a ninja wasn't a nine-to-five affair. This she did in her own, irrepressible way: by leaving all their stuff in a box outside the door of her apartment.

Then there were those that couldn't keep up with her, couldn't demonstrate the kind of energy she had, even if she wasn't tapping her reserves of chakra. Then there were those that she frightened with her blunt honesty and the spectre of death that lived in the corners of her brilliant blue eyes. And that one weirdo that was attracted to it; he most certainly didn't warrant the second date he'd requested.

And then there was the occasional ninja who got it -- but they never had the time to sit it out, to make it work. They all live on borrowed time, she knows, but Ino is too much of an optimist, she knows, to forego planning for the future.

She's pathetic, and she knows it. Pathetic and lonely. Thank goodness for distractions.

"Oi, Ino, how are you this morning?"

It's Kiba, standing there in the doorway, hands in his pockets, slouching casually against himself. His untidy hair is slick with sweat, and if not for the legions of flowers surrounding her, Ino is sure she would be able to smell him at this range. He's still breathing a little heavily, no doubt from the regular Saturday morning game of basketball he hosts with his fellow genin-leader TenTen.

"Better, at least since Sakura visited. I definitely shouldn't have drunk nearly that much last night," she sighs, slumping forward on her elbows, propping her cheek up with the flat of one hand.

"I'll say," Kiba grins sardonically, as Akamaru makes his appearance, "I had to drag your sorry butt up two flights of stairs before throwing you into bed. Nice place, by the way."

Ino blushes involuntarily, she'd been under the impression that Sakura had promised to carry her home. Then again, she wasn't sure she trusted any memories of the night whatsoever.

Akamaru takes this opportunity to be tickled by one of the flowers in a plastic bin outside the shop, sneezing violently as a result. There is no pretense in the sneeze, no human attempt to stop it. His entire body convulses with the force of the expulsion, his eyes screwing shut and all four paws leaving the concrete as he jerks backwards three inches.

He's no longer the awkward, vivacious puppy he once was, though he preserves a sense of mischief in equal proportion to his master. Which is not surprising, considering how profoundly bound the Inuzuka are to their animals. He's a tall dog, with long legs that put him at thigh height on Kiba -- relatively impressive for a hound-something mutt, considering that Kiba is probably one of the tallest ninjas in the village these days.

Kiba offers his eternal companion an indulgent glance, then goes on, innocently relating the rest of his sordid tale as thought it were completely inconsequential.

"And then you thought you lost your keys, even though you were holding them in your other hand..." Kiba dodges a lethally aimed flower stem, which lodges in the hood of his black sweatshirt. "Oops," he says, grinning.

OoOoOoO

Ino, and her prey by extension, kneel on the familiar texture of the tatami mats. She keeps an eye on the clock. Everything needs to be timed perfectly, now. If she rushes, she won't be able to do it right; if she takes too long, everything could fall apart. Still, she takes a moment to breathe slowly, heavily, gathering herself.

In one hand, her captive lordling holds a single sheet of rice paper, translucent against the harsh interior lighting and glowing with the intricate, unique fractal pattern belonging to each sheet of the expensive paper. In the other, she deftly, almost daintily holds a brush tipped with camel hairs, soaked in black ink, opaque as blindness.

With a gentle, firm touch, she swiftly begins the calligraphy she has practiced so long; forgery become art. She has studied his hand for days, hours, practicing secluded at her desk at home, then on the floor, writing, matching, comparing her product to his unhurried writing, secure in its unchallenged superiority.

No longer.

She flicks her wrist silently, bending a joint that does not belong to her, and there is no mental struggle. He is strong willed, but he does not yet realize what is happening. Nor will he ever, if things go her way. She concentrates on the form, the message, its content is burned forevermore on the back of her consciousness. She cannot forget it, and her hand lifts away, completing another word. It's a race against time, against perfection, against error. One more line, three and a half minutes remaining.

Above her, the crystalline stalactite of a chandelier glitters down at his unwary body, kneeling, writing in its septic light. Blood from the sun's dying rays paint themselves over the eastern wall, in a thin slash, silhouetting his head against it like a puppet behind a curtain. Irrationally, Ino thinks that it is good that the wall is not transparent.

This isn't even the hard part. Her own nervousness is taking charge of the man's body. His heart beat accelerates, thumping, unaware that it will cease shortly. Sweat beads from the oily promontory of his forehead, and she uses his sleeve to wipe it clear. One more word, two minutes, twenty seconds.

Her silent work continues, her mind the puppeteer, guiding him with his own myelin-sheathed strings, playing him with his own nerves. She is his unspeaking mistress, and he does not even know that the impersonation that will claim him is studied, perfected, learned.

The brush rounds the final curve of the last character of his name and she examines her work, brushing away yet another tide of worrisome drops threatening to fall from his forehead. Vestiges of the day's crushing heat, tolerable in her own body, are impossible in this fat-insulated walking corpse, she thinks, muttering in her mind. Or is it his?

She doesn't concern herself, and hopes no one has noticed her inert form in the cafe across the way. What if those two uneasy admirers she'd disdained earlier notice something is wrong? What if they get help? Can she pass it off as a fainting spell? Or is that too obvious?

Where the hell are her friends when she really needs them?

She stops herself then and there. Two steady breaths. Just under a minute remaining.

No. She doesn't need the help. The mission above all. The mission over everything. She is, and will be when this is done. The cheater will not.

Slowly, deliberately, she moves his gnarled hands away from the single, elegantly filled page of calligraphy. It is balanced, planned. Just like everything else he has written. The margins are even, the words centered in straight columns, pictograms conveying his unspoken shame that he, no doubt, does not feel.

"Forgive me, for I have brought dishonor to my nation, my clan, and myself."

The fingers of his right hand fight the wakizashi in his sash, closing around its leather-wrapped hilt. She revels in the sensation, it is a fine weapon, no doubt a heirloom, and so symbolically appropriate. It comes free slowly, inching smoothly from the scabbard, bathed in red light, preemptively bloodied by the vanishing sunlight. She closes his other hand over the fist clutching the handle, closing her eyes.

For a fleeting instant, she is unsure if she can do it. Even though it isn't her body, she still needs to win a battle with her own sense of self-preservation, to fight the instinct to stay alive at any cost, to put down anyone that tries to stop her. The first time she tried something like this, she almost couldn't do it. It wasn't until she realized she'd had less than five seconds remaining that she ended it and snapped backwards into her self again. She can't mess this one up, though, the stakes are too exaggerated, the mission too delicately balanced against its consequences.

When this ends, there will be no evidence she was ever here. No evidence she was ever nearby. No one will know, or remember. Even now, even as she forces him to hold his blade before him, someone in Konoha is burning the mission order.

So much easier to frame someone. The last time, she was a homeless vagrant armed with nothing more than a shattered blade of glass wrapped in a dirty rag, tearing apart her nameless target with animal fury. Investigators, she found out later, reasoned that her tool was under the influence of drugs at the time. They were half right.

Even that isn't the easiest way. Using different family members to bring poison into the house, move it from place to place, or even self-administration. Men directed to slaughter their entire families, while an anonymous tip from a stranger brings in the police just as they put their wife or children to the blade.

Ino is always nearby, but never seen. She is the puppet mistress. She is the Cleaner.

Is she a cheater too?

OoOoOoO

"So," Ino asks, casually, casting her own grin into the room, "who's the flavour of the month?"

Kiba groans, rolling his eyes, as he steps up to the counter. Akamaru stays outside, stretching out on his side next to the threshold. He knows that Ino's mother doesn't like dogs, much less dogs in the store, tracking in dirt and lord-knows-what-else and eating the flowers, not that he would.

"Nobody," Kiba says, trying vainly to cast off his admittedly deserved title of one of Konoha's most prolific playboy-ninjas. He'd never talked to Ino much before they were jounins; they'd been on separate teams, and interacted rarely if ever. They'd chosen different paths, too. Ino had chosen to specialize with a specific department, and Kiba had continued to take general missions with no specific life goal in mind.

It was his sister, Hana, who'd suggested maybe he should try teaching the next generation. Ten Ten had convinced him. He was currently into his third year with his first team of genin, and his first year not spent complaining that they just didn't understand what he was trying to impart to them.

Of course, because he was a teacher, it was easy to assume he was good with kids. Akamaru himself was utterly irresistible. No surprise that Kiba quickly attracted one hell of a lot of attention to himself and suddenly found himself having to deal with problems he'd never anticipated, and needing flowers and female advice to solve.

Ino cocks an eyebrow.

"Nobody? I find that hard to believe." She doesn't give Kiba a second to reply, and launches her already soprano voice into a painfully ear-grating falsetto, folding her arms over her chest in a false swoon. "Oh, Kiba, you're so handsome! And a ninja too! What's it like?"

He cringes, withering under her karmic retribution for daring to recount her twilight misadventures the night before.

"They never know," he grumbles, slumping onto the counter and punching her in the shoulder.

Ino can't help but commiserate. "I know. There was this one guy that dared to tell me I smelled funny when I came back unshowered from six days in the forest and collapsed into bed."

"Seriously," he says, grinning, "I had one bitch that I'd forgotten her birthday when I was out escorting some VIP with the kids. What, I'm going to kawarimi myself two hundred miles?"

Her laughter is contagious, and shortly Akamaru is snorting in a canine approximation of mirth from his recumbent position in the doorframe. "Yeah, I think I remember that one. You wanted a bouquet to make it up to her. Not that she lasted long anyway."

"Hey, quiet, Akamaru," Kiba shoots back at the sudden bark from his symbiotic pet, "even if that was true."

The curious link he has with his dog is beyond her, and she finds herself suddenly and inexplicably envious. It would be nice to always have someone along with her, some kind of company on long lonely, paranoid nights in some darkened forest in the middle of nowhere, while waiting to die. Another moment where Kiba and Akamaru stare at each other, oblivious to the world, sharing an unheard conversation. She wonders if they're conducting it at high frequency, above the range of normal human hearing, or if it's a telepathic bond they share.

"Must be nice," she says under her breath, "never being alone."

"What is?" he asks, startled by her intrusion into his private canine world. His head tilts slightly, like a confused puppy.

"Never being alone. You know, you and Akamaru," she chuckles.

"Ha, yeah. I guess. He's a good guy; it's too bad you guys can't get to know him better. Still, you know, he's not a person, no offense."

Akamaru lets out a soft, growled sigh, his expansive ribcage flattening out against the tile.

OoOoOoO

The blade flashes once more in the sunlight.

Then agony, as its flame-hardened tip effortlessly parts the skin, plunges through fat and lashes into a band of muscle. Ino forces herself, forces the man to keep his face still. She's giving him far more credit, far more honour than he deserves. He should have a second here, another with a katana at the ready to behead him should his face betray his pain. But he doesn't.

The letter she has forged and his peculiar behavior these last few days, running scared, should be enough to make any investigator dismiss these oddities.

Her eye, his eye, twitch synchronically as she fights back a wave of nausea and focuses on the pain. She needs the pain to keep her focused, on target, on time. She has forty seconds left. She needs the blade to go deeper; the wound is not fatal yet.

She has no idea why this is so difficult, why it is always so unforgivably difficult in her mind. It's not her body, she reminds herself, it's not hers, it's not her that is dying...but every time...

The pain surges up, stabbing sharply, brutally through the shuddering body that she has appropriated, and in a moment of clarity, she knows why. She knows that she is afraid, in spite of all her training, in spite of all the preparation and her own irrational desire to excel, to be the best, to overcome -- she knows that she is afraid of dying alone. She is afraid of being expendable, of being forgotten, of being unnoticed.

But she is a ninja.

She breathes in, once, sharply, and is gratified to see that that alone has plunged the knife another half inch through her target's flesh. Further, she thinks, further. She needs to hit the artery, to guarantee a kill before any aid can arrive.

His breathing, her breathing, is shallow now, quickened with the pain as the wakizashi passes into a coil of intestine. Shock is starting, and she fights the grey seeping in at the edges of her vision. His eyes are starting to roll back into his head, and she forces them to stay locked forward. She needs something to look at, something to see through glazed eyes. She picks a tree in a landscape painted on a screen at the far side of the room, a beautiful, willowy tree.

Resistance greets the blade again as it presses into the muscle backing the man's abdominal cavity. Runnels of blood flicker down through the black silk, dribbling into splotches on the woven bamboo floor, a viscous black creek of life, ebbing outwards on a gravity-driven tide. Death swims upstream.

She closes his eyes, and jerks the wakizashi from left to right, in one smooth, uninhibited motion. It is so sudden, so unannounced, that she surprises even herself. She doesn't have to open his eyes to know she's won. She cheated, like usual, and won. She doesn't have to see the vermillion peacock's tail spraying out across the room as his lower aorta is split, she doesn't have to see the severed ends of his intestine uncoiling into the humid room, doesn't have to see the black silk growing inexplicably darker in the fading sunlight.

Her elastic consciousness snaps back into her body, pulled. Time's up, and the meaningless words of a book with a maroon bookmark stare up at her. She can feel the ghost of a sword in her belly, and the angry specter of pain slashing through her mind.

She leaves an uncounted denomination of bills on the table and leaves before anyone notices how pale she is. Yes, she thinks, the cheater won again, as she darts into an alleyway and vomits.

But it's over. Tomorrow, she will be in Konoha. She will be with friends. She won't be lonely any more.

OoOoOoO

"Believe it or not," Kiba says, perusing through a bucket full of roses with their thorns trimmed off, "I came to see how you were doing. I mean, you were a wreck last night, and I was probably too drunk to take care of you properly."

"That makes two of us," she says, grinning from where she's sitting on the counter. Akamaru snorts, clearly amused. The damn dog's never been drunk in his life, as though he could understand, she thinks. Akamaru snorts again, as if he heard her thinking.

"Anyway, I'm glad to see you're not too badly off," he says, standing straight again. He hesitates momentarily, and she's sure she'd have never noticed if she hadn't gotten to know him as well as she did. "Look, actually, I've got something I should ask you."

Ino's voice rings out in triumph.

"Knew it! Who is it?"

And now she's the one with the malicious smile.

"As if I'm telling you; the whole village will know by sundown."

"Ouch," she recoils, pretending to pout. Akamaru snickers -- no doubt, he must know. Too bad the dog can't be pumped for information.

"Anyway, I've been watching her for a while, and we're pretty good friends, but I don't know if I should bring her flowers or whatever." Kiba is oddly sheepish, a boy overgrown to ridiculous proportions, with his arms crossed behind his head. He does this all the time, when he's at a loss, and it's adorable, as far as she's concerned. Off the top of her head, she rattles off a bunch of different flowers which should go well together. Instinctively, she coordinates scents and colours, her finger guiding his attention around the room.

"You should probably throw in one rose. Maybe not a red one, especially if you don't know how she feels, but something to let her know that you're not just being friendly. I'd think it was pretty classy."

Kiba nods, pretending he really understands what she's talking about.

"Cool," he says, finally, putting his hands back in his pocket. "Well, if I make up my mind, I'll come see you for the flowers," he says, a small smile lighting his face.

"You're just a big cheater," she says, sticking out her tongue, "using me to spy on my gender."

"Yeah, I know. But when you're playing to win, sometimes you have to cheat."

He pauses by the door on his way out, his foot idly kicking the door frame, before turning to look her in the eyes.

"Hey, I'm taking Akamaru out to the field for a walk. Wanna come? I know you're bored."

She thinks about it. It's been a quiet day. But it doesn't have to be a lonely one.

"Sure," she says, and vaults the counter like only a dirty cheating ninja can.

OoOoOoO

Author's Notes:

I always thought that Ino was a heavily underused character, especially once you find out what she can do. She's a monster, or has the potential to be one. She's a bit of an attention hog, yes, and I think that speaks of her insecurities as much as the rest of her rowdy character, only I don't think she necessarily realizes it.

Sakura, too, was brutally underused in the opening story arcs. I despised her because the artist gave her such intelligence and raw talent with her chakra and did nothing with it, surrendering her to the weak-willed female archetype, although I always enjoyed the idea of Inner Sakura. I don't mind her any more since she's a wicked bitch with a worse punch these days...and I figure that her relationship with Ino has smoothed out significantly, especially since that pissant Sasuke is out of the picture.

Oh, and Kiba? He's probably the most balanced, unpretentious character in the series. His wardrobe was outright ridiculous for a while, but it's good to see he's diversified somewhat since.


	3. Power Play::The Game

She stands alone.

She stands alone, on the vast transom of the compound, in the doorway, staring into the gathered faces of a lifetime of neglect and disappointment. They all stare back at her, eyes glowing in the wan light of the hundred lanterns that hang around the courtyard and the barest sliver of a crescent moon. Behind her, the doors hang ponderously on their hinges, great iron-fortified berms fashioned into a barrier, a mobile wall.

This house, this palace, is more of a bastion than any other part of the city, more so even than some places that do call themselves fortresses. It is enclosed, turtle-like, by four impenetrable stone walls that ward the family they were designed to protect.

She stands alone in the doorway, staring at the eyes glowing back at her like creatures of the night, all of them half-shrouded in the shadows which flicker playfully among the throng. She can sense the expectation, the anxiety, the fear. She can feel the mistrust, the distaste, the byzantine plots, the simmering hatreds. She feels their prejudice. Their prejudice against her and against each other, between everyone and everything.

She knows it is there because she has borne it her entire life.

Hyuuga Hinata steps into her house, her hooded cape draped loosely over her shoulders, her face obscured by the emblem of her village engraved in metal. Even so, they all know it is her. She wears the armour of the Anbu, as much a symbol of her service as the enameled masks she would normally wear -- but she needs a new one, and she has not had time to rectify its absence.

Behind her, four servants groan as quietly as they can, straining against the dead weight of the main gates, which swing heavily into place. There is a clatter as the forged iron bolts slide into position and are locked down.

Silence reigns. Everyone who is anyone in the family is here, now. Waiting -- for her.

She can see the elders, studying her with pointed interest. Some of them are bent over, hobbling on canes, leaning on younger, haler members for support. Some of them still have relatively intact bodies, and stand tall, proud, suffused and supported by the legendary pride and arrogance that fueled everyone here. Or almost everyone...Hinata disliked grouping herself and her own motivations along with them.

Neji is with them, and he gently guides the oldest, must crumpled looking man towards her, where she stands, unmoving, frozen in the wan moonlight. He already knows what she has to announce; he was present for the mission debrief.

The old man shuffles towards her, his arm hooked through Neji's elbow, his gnarled hand resting on an equally abused cane, and his expression is serene, uncomplicated, and curiously vacant, an expression that could be senile on anyone else. He isn't; he wouldn't be an elder if he were. As he approaches, Hinata drops to one knee out of deference for a man who was once the clan leader, a dreaded ninja in his own time and once a contender for the title of Hokage. His face is lined and wrinkled, slashes of scar tissue traversing the crags and valleys of his features.

His pale eyes have no pupils, no irises -- they are clear white orbs, bloodshot with age around the edges.

Everyone present, with the exception of the groundskeepers and servants, have the same, eerily inhuman eyes. They all share the same core bloodline, the same genetic predisposition which unlocks one of the oldest, most powerful ninja techniques of all time: the byakugan.

The sound of shuffling feet comes to a cadence, and ends, and Hinata can see he is standing three feet away from her kneeling, shrouded form. He doesn't ask anything; he doesn't need to. She already knows why they are here, all of them.

"It is done," she says, in her small, delicate voice, barely higher than a whisper, as she unties the sash holding up her metal blindfold.

The old man nods. It is done. Hyuuga Hiashi is avenged.

OoOoOoO

She stands alone, this time before a house of a different sort, a black enamel box resting lightly in her hands.

Overhead, the sun gleams brightly, standing on the zenith of the world and ruling absolute over the sky. Brilliance lances down over Konoha, lighting every avenue and every structure, illuminating a community whose every member is bound to each other with a sense of comradeship and purpose.

Hinata is at home here, outdoors, in the sun. It's less oppressive, less frightening than being enclosed by people and walls. With an open sky overhead, the weight that has always pressed on her shoulders seems to vanish. It was Kiba, she thinks, who first noticed how she stood taller, brighter in the great outdoors.

She allows a small smile to light the corner of her face, as she gazes up at the white facade of the two-story house before her, squeezed between its immediate neighbors like so many other dwellings in Konoha's haphazard construction. Curved clay tiles line the eaves, and she can see a handful of clouds reflected in the windows, curling in winds high far above her, carried away, free.

She wishes she could be like them, twisting carefree and careless, following her life wherever it would go. The slight upturning of her lips is vaguely wistful, largely because she knows it could never be that way. Not now. Not ever.

This is a house she knows well. It is a house she loves -- a home. It was her home for what, five years? At least. From where she stands, she can see the window to the small, congested study that was her room, her refuge during that time. The window where she would sit, sometimes, and watch the people outside her window, watch the mobs, free from the responsibilities and expectations that crowd her world. The seat where she would sit and wish she could be like them.

She is wearing a white kimono, in a formal style, spattered with embroidered flowers and the Hyuuga clan emblem featured prominently in the centre of the vastly complicated obi knot. Her short bangs are pulled up and clipped away from her rounded face, and she is faintly annoyed, unused to this style and her ever-present desire to be inconspicuous and unnoticed. She feels flashy, and awkward, and unnatural, and strangely deceptive.

Nevertheless, her shoulders are squared -- she is heir more to an image than anything else.

Yuuhi Kurenai's shock drives the point home when she answers the door.

"Hi...Hinata? Is that you?"

OoOoOoO

There is no reason for any further delay. Without fanfare, Neji and the elder turn towards the main house, towards the gathering hall that occupies most of the central building's volume, and by unspoken consensus, the rest of the elders, and then the family follow like a pack of wolves silently moving into the night.

Hinata stays where she is, unsure of whether or not she should follow. Her heart screams at her to leave, but her feet remain planted where they are, for some unfathomable reason.

The question of succession in the Hyuuga household has always been subject to ambiguity for as long as Hinata has been alive, and she knows this far too well. Her own exile was inglorious, shameful, and she had never had a good relationship with her father, the late head of the clan. Hanabi is the obvious choice, despite being her sister and five years her junior, having almost been groomed to replace her as successor.

They are more different than anyone could have imagined at their respective births.

Hinata is petite, slender, unassuming, and possessed by the bad habit of slouching, which makes her seem even smaller than she already is. When she was younger, perhaps, one might have likened her to a mouse, the natural prey of the cat -- the Hyuuga family's totem. She was never very skilled at the 'gentle fist', the proprietary fighting style of the clan, though she is competent now, nor very remarkable as a shinobi. She was unconfident and unsettled, and unable to credit herself or avoid blaming herself either, and she is unsure if much of that has changed.

She watches Hanabi stride into the hall on long legs, the last to enter, tall, her unfettered jet-black hair streaming in a broad fan behind her in a vision of elegance. Her eyes have lost all of their innocence, replaced by the hardened gaze of a veteran soldier who has killed and does not care, by the eyes of an assassin. Her fighting technique is impeccable, guided through every step of its development by their shared father, and later refined through her own considerable talents. Certainly, she is not as good as Neji, resident genius and now the best possible teacher of the style for the next generation, but more than good enough to level just about everyone else in the house.

And she is arrogant. She is steeped in the knowledge that the Hyuuga clan are now and have always been the most powerful clan in the region for centuries. She is secure in the knowledge that no one, anywhere, will best her in single combat -- even if she cannot beat Neji, she will always be able to lord over him the cursed seal that he hates, the one that will bend him to her desires or kill him. Even if he is the highest ranked member of Konoha's Anbu, and its respected chieftain. No one, anywhere, can stop her ascension.

But Hinata is not jealous, not of Hanabi. Hinata feels no envy for her sisters blaring confidence, for the aura of power and the demanded respect. She can't be, no matter how she might try. They are too different.

Above all, she does not want to enter that hall. More than anything, she wants to turn on her heel, pass through those massive gates, and never return. Nothing holds her here, not to this place where she was born and rejected. How long was it when no one here had given her any respect, ever believed in her?

She feels unwanted. She stands alone.

Hanabi stops at the threshold of the ornate doorway, her hand on one of the sliding panels that bears the clan crest. It is dark now, the crescent moon temporarily obscured overhead, and she has some difficulty making out Hanabi's expression. She suspects she knows what it will be, however. It is a sneer, and she finds that she is correct when Hanabi takes a further step into the flickering talcum light of one of the hanging paper lanterns encircling the courtyard.

It is a dare. The kind of dare that Hanabi knows will go unresolved, a challenge that will not be met. The look that Hanabi wears whenever she invites Hinata to spar, to remind her that she is now and always will be her inferior, in spite of their age and the correct order of ascension; is she the jealous one?

Before she really realizes it, Hinata is shrugging off her mist-grey Anbu-issue cloak, folding it over her forearm, and stalking after Hanabi towards the hall, towards her sister's retreating back. It's not until a servant takes the hooded cape from her that she realizes she is in motion and that she cannot stop.

OoOoOoO

Like a flawed mirror, Kurenai is somehow Hinata's opposite this morning, a sleep-rumpled, unprepared version of herself that virtually no one ever gets to see. Her eyes, initially tired, are open and alert now, stunned by the drastically changed young woman standing on her doorstep, somehow at odds with the rusted tin can full of ashes and crumpled cigarette butts sharing the space with her. She knows her hair has to be a mess, and her disheveled robe feels oddly inappropriate when contrasted with Hinata's gorgeous kimono.

"Teacher," Hinata says, softly, accompanying her greeting with a shallow, respectful bow from the waist. Lord, Kurenai thinks, she's being formal today. What could possibly be the matter?

"Um, Lady Hinata," she replies, just as formally. Hinata, after all, is from a clan that is not only highly respected as ninjas, but nobility in the outside world as well. She affects her own bow, hand clutching together the folds of her tattered old robe as she does so. "Good morning. Would you like to come in?"

Hinata's thanks are so quiet as to be almost unheard, and Kurenai steps back to let her past.

"Teacher, I apologize for disturbing you so early today," her once-student adds, slipping off her sandals while Kurenai closes the door behind them, and Kurenai puts aside her growing urge to shake the poor girl until she can get a grip.

She's not sure how she should interpret Hinata's face, today a curious mask of uncertainty that has the potential to dissolve into pathetic tears or unyielding determination. Her ghostly eyes are wavering, and if Kurenai could truly make out anything more than the hint of their actual pupils, she would be able to see if Hinata was just staring at the floor or looking around. Idly, she motions Hinata into her living room, silently offering her one of the cushions on the tatami-tiled floor as a seat at the low table where she was considering having breakfast not twenty minutes ago. Hinata kneels, proper, her back straight, her head erect, and her feet carefully folded under her, and Kurenai suddenly thinks she understands. She makes no move to correct the growing smile that creeps onto her face as Hinata carefully places the box on the table.

"Hinata," she says, drawing her pupil's attention and unnerving stare, "first things first."

"Teacher?"

"First of all, you stop calling me that. I'm not your teacher any more, and we have the same rank. Second, I'd like to think I'm a better friend of yours, so Kurenai will do. Understood?"

Her own smile is metamorphosing slyly with a sureness she hasn't felt in a while. Hinata's carefully composed look shatters in an instant, her eyes blinking back a short parade of emotions that Kurenai can't actually decipher with any degree of certainty.

"Y-yes, ma'am," she says, an ancient, embarrassed stutter stumbling from her mouth, a vocal accident that snatches her hand from where it lay by her side to cover her erring lips. She corrects herself: "Yes, Kurenai," and then nervously rearranges her legs on the violet pillow.

Kurenai's house is sparsely, but elegantly decorated. The wall opposite the archway into the living room displays a framed watercolour of a forest on a mountainside, an original painting by a local artist, this last certified by the red square stamped in the corner beneath his signature. The brushwork is impeccable, subtle hues fading and flowing into each other in an ethereal dance. A flock of delicate birds hovers over an army of trees in the mist, their motion forever captured in the same dilute ink that seems to give the rocks life. She'd bought it a long time ago, captivated by the near-perfect photorealism of the print, a reminder that nothing in the world she shared with Hinata was as it seemed.

"You don't mind if I eat while we talk, I hope," Kurenai says, going on, pushing at Hinata's limits. For all her own propriety outside, she likes to play by her rules in her own house, and hopefully, some of this will remind Hinata that this house was once her house too. Not waiting for an answer, she disappears momentarily into the kitchen to grab her breakfast. "Do you want some tea?"

OoOoOoO

It is clear that the elders have already decided who will lead the clan by the time Hinata has entered the hall. Everything in this room has the sheen of money well-spent, from the polished cherry beams holding up the room and walls to the gold-leaf screens delineating the edges of the room. The elders kneel behind a long, low table, lacquered black and red, and inlaid with twisting, filigreed gold vines. A row of banners hang behind them, and in the middle is a small shrine dedicated to the mourning of Hyuuga Hiashi's passing, and his ever unnerving stare projects, commanding, from a face that will never be seen again.

Hyuuga Hiashi -- the last head of the Hyuuga clan. Father of an assassin and an Anbu, uncle of the Anbu's own headmaster, and a formidable ninja in his own right, until his untimely death at the hands of his insane second cousin.

It is not until Hinata passes the half-way point along the unobstructed aisle the clan has left in the middle of the room that Hanabi notices she did not stay outside. She fixes her sister with an uncharitable glare, one shrouded in anger and inflamed with some deeper, primal emotion.

Besides the two of them, Neji is the only other member of the clan standing, the only one with sufficient rank and power in the village to have earned that right. He, of course, can never be head of the main house, but he will serve in some regards as a master of ceremonies. His face is impassive, unreadable, inscrutable as he stands just to the right of the table where the clan elders are gathered. Hinata wishes he would betray some emotion, let something slip, something to reassure her -- but he won't, she knows. Like everyone else, his head protector is absent, the cruelly inscribed seal obvious on his otherwise unruffled forehead. In moments like these, clan tradition dictates that everyone know who is of the main house, and who is not, so no one steps out of line. Hinata suspects that this will not matter to Neji, that this part of the tradition is somehow irrelevant to him, and she is most likely right.

Hinata slows her pace, lightens her footsteps until she is standing next to Hanabi. Together, on an unspoken cue, they bow for their elders, demonstrating the respect and fealty that these old men and women, main house and branch house, have earned. No doubt one day Neji will sit on this august panel himself, she thinks idly, and knows she is right.

Something, she thinks, is wrong. She is not...expected, even though it is her every right to stand here, to take part in this ceremony so critical for the house. She supposes this is partly her fault, both because she has never tried to impress anyone, but also because she has been absent from the family compound for such a long time. Not recently, perhaps, emboldened by her own, late-blooming successes, but absent nevertheless.

There are murmurs in the crowd, where there should be none. Rumors, suggestions, innuendo. Hanabi is looking increasingly disconcerted, as they both kneel at the head of the room. Hinata's presence has forced her sister to move two feet to the left from the exact centre of the room, and Hinata mirrors her on the right.

"Silence!" hisses Neji, through clenched teeth, and all extraneous noise is brought to a sudden, crashing halt.

There is more discussion, this time from the strangely distant members of the family council, and Hinata closes her eyes and shuts out the world, shuts out Hanabi's palpable anger and confusion, Neji's uncaring stare, and the feeling of dozens of pairs of eyes boring through the Anbu armour she is still wearing. She concentrates herself on the warm compression it imparts to her, hugging her skin, protecting her from the world. It is her shell, her refuge in this tense moment, and she rests, gathering herself. The storm is coming.

At last silence rules supreme, and she knows this has to be it.

The oldest of the elders clears his throat, a conflicted, horrible sound, a grating of phlegm and gradually failing respiratory passages, and he speaks in a brutal cacophony of rasping.

"Tradition dictates that the first-born is the heir of the main house," he says, a grudging acceptance of her place on the floor here next to Hanabi, "and that the clan must be led by the strongest of its members."

Historically, there has never been a conflict between these two precepts. Hinata nods once, curtly. Her voice, when she speaks, is a susurration, the softest breeze in a stand of maple trees.

"I understand," she says, and relief flickers across Hanabi's face -- but only for a moment. "Let us settle this," she finishes, and awe falls over the room as she makes her pronouncement.

Fury clouds Hanabi's expression, followed by confident triumph.

And that, thinks Hinata, is why I cannot let you have the clan, dear sister. It's time to stand up.

OoOoOoO

Hinata inhales once, slowly, drinking in the blended aroma of her tea, gently swirling the hemispherical ceramic vessel in her cupped hands and watching the tea leaves dance counter-clockwise beneath her. The tea brings back memories, hundreds of memories, some of which she has forgotten, some of which she has wanted to. She looks up to find Kurenai smiling at her over a remarkably foul bowl of rice and natto; she never did acquire the taste.

"So what brings you here this early in the morning?" Kurenai asks, black chopsticks stirring leftover rice into her meal idly. When she pulls them up out of the bowl, they are coated with something sticky, something decidedly reminiscent of wet cobwebs. "And don't tell me it's noon already, I know I slept in."

Hinata doesn't speak right away, her stalling tactic pre-empted before she could bring it to bear. Kurenai knows her too well, knows her habit of circumlocution and how to avoid it. She was always to the point, always finding the key. Her fingers move in her lap, and she wants to bring them together, reassure herself with her own touch like she always does, but she forces them to stay still.

When she speaks, she speaks clearly.

"I wanted to thank you, Kurenai. Teacher," she says, looking up and meeting her mentor's confused stare with a smile of her own. She feels oddly free, oddly liberated, and the smell of her tea mingling with Kurenai's fermented soy reminds her of the time she decided she would try it herself: 'it really wakes you up,' Kurenai had said. The last time she'd felt so sick, Hinata remembers, was the one time she'd been poisoned in combat, and she is in no hurry to repeat either the natto or the poisoning experience.

Kurenai is not bothered by the taste, and slowly mulls over a mouthful, swallowing before speaking. "What for?" she asks, genuinely confused.

Hinata also remembers Kurenai's deft hands, shaking with laughter as they held back her hair while she stared at the toilet, and she can't help but let the smallest, most fragile giggle past her lips.

"I never thanked you properly," Hinata continues, "for helping me. For letting me stay, for teaching me...everything. For being patient." For being the sister Hanabi could never be, Hinata wants to say, but she ends it there. Maybe Kurenai would understand anyway, she thinks, and she bows low, at the waist, giving Kurenai a glimpse of the emblem embroidered into her obi for the first time.

The is a sharp click as Kurenai drops her chopsticks into her bowl and catches them again just as suddenly.

"I...you're welcome," she blinks, a little stunned, putting down the bowl before she embarrasses herself. Hinata, for her part, plays the serene Hyuuga as she takes another sip of her tea. She looks away, up at the painting on the wall, and reminds herself that looks are always deceiving. "It was the least I could do, really."

Hinata allows herself a smile, indulging in the lightly spiced flavor playing on her tongue. Kurenai goes on after a pause.

"I guess I saw a little of myself in you," she says. "They tell you when you become a teaching jounin that you shouldn't get attached to your students, because there might be a time you can't help them, and that you shouldn't see them as kids, because they're ninjas too. But I could see you were scared in a lot of the same ways I was...and I just wanted you to feel better about yourself."

It's Hinata's turn to be thrown a little off balance; Kurenai's admission is not one she'd ever heard before, and she can't possibly imagine a Kurenai without her control and pride, a self-deprecating Kurenai without the confidence that made her above all a woman in Hinata's eyes.

"I guess we turned out all right after all, didn't we, Hinata?" she asks, and Hinata cannot help but agree.

OoOoOoO

Hyuuga Hanabi is furious. Without another word, Hinata stands, staring at her where she is still kneeling. Not to be outdone, she is on her feet in the most fluid, most gracious, and most aggressive manner she can manage, silently reminding her undeserving sister that she has a good eight inches on her. Hinata, for her part, is not locked into her usual slouch, and that eight inches feels smaller than it has ever felt before.

Everything is wrong, everything is unbalanced.

Neji is nonplussed by Hinata's quiet announcement, and announces that the decision will be settled in the gardens. Again, the elders file out, followed by the clan. Undoubtedly, they will find seating or standing room around the edges of the meticulously maintained gardens behind the main hall, or along the well-groomed stone paths at the edges. A garden, which tomorrow, Hanabi is sure, will need to be re-groomed by the gardeners. As the last of the family files out, talking animately in hushed tones among themselves, she watches Neji close the door behind them.

In a way, he is there in his capacity as head of the branch house, in another as the director of tonight's events. She knows he is there so that their fight does not start before it is supposed to, and as much as she wants to reach over and strangle Hinata right now, Neji won't let her. Damn him and his mocking superiority. How did they all get into this mess?

"What are you doing, Hinata?" she snarls, "Do you want me to kill you? Is that it?"

Hinata doesn't say anything, pulling back into her usual, frustratingly maddening reticence. Why can't she just admit that she can't possibly hope to be the clan head? Why can't she just give up now like she always has in the face of her family? Why doesn't she just leave, dodge the issue like she did for years?

Clicks echo through the vacant chamber as Hinata pulls at the straps and buckles holding her combat armor onto her limbs and torso, the treated leather thongs slithering like snakes as they come loose and abandon the molded steel to the grip of gravity. One by one, the layers of Hinata's armor clatter to the ground until she is wearing nothing but a simple grey tunic and pants, still stained and dirty from her most recent mission in the field. Her mission of vengeance, and one which Hanabi had wanted so very badly -- the one that would have proven her place in the family for once and for all.

"You know you can't win this! I've beaten you in every match we've ever had, not to mention you were away so long I was frankly impressed you remembered anything." And yes, she is jealous. Jealous that Hinata had convinced Neji to teach her the kaiten and the sixty-four palms during her self-imposed exile. Jealous that Hinata is even being allowed this chance to prove herself, jealous because she knows that if she were the weak one, the second-born would never get that chance. "You can't win, Hinata. Quit now, or I will kill you."

When Hinata finally speaks, she sounds too much like Neji, too prepossessed. "You are allowing your emotions to colour this conflict," she says, finally facing her sister, meeting her frozen eyes across an immeasurable void. "Meet me outside when you are ready...and I promise -- I cannot allow you to win."

With that, Hinata steps towards the door. Neji slides it open for her, not looking at either of them, and closing it in the wake of her passage.

And Hanabi is left in the room with the damnable knowledge that Hinata is right, and she focuses, concentrating on herself until she is an avatar of calm. The flow of chakra in her limbs is smooth, uninterrupted, her fingers steady and equipped with the deadly accuracy her jyuuken fighting style demands. Confident hands reach up to where her hands are bound in cloth, and she tightens and adjusts them, until her hands are tense, supported, and ready for battle.

She looks to the pile of armor and weapons on the floor, and she notices that Hinata has abandoned all of her kunai, her shuriken, her scrolls. Even her Konoha head protector lies here on the floor. For all intents and purposes, Hinata is naked. This fight will come down to the jyuuken, the only real proof of kinship in this family.

Hanabi grins, her expression edging on cruel.

No, she thinks, Hinata can't win this, no matter what she says. It's impossible.

OoOoOoO

"I...also wanted to let you know why I went back," Hinata adds, shyly. They may as well trade secrets at this point. "I didn't want you to think I was unhappy here, or that you didn't mean anything to me," she says.

"I wouldn't believe it even if you said so," Kurenai interrupts, relieved enough to start in on her bowl of natto again. Hinata's nose crinkles, and Kurenai suspects that she would like more tea, but is too polite to ask right now.

"I was here...when I became a chuunin...and when I became a jounin," and Kurenai has to settle her own accounts of jealousy towards that one remarkably talented year of graduates, all of whom had made that last, highest grade of ninja at an earlier age than she had. Hinata continues: "But I never told father that I had ever been promoted. You remember how he was training Hanabi when you told him you were going to be my teacher?"

Kurenai was appalled, that day, for the first time in a long while, at how poorly esteemed Hinata was in her own house. She only nods, the barest acknowledgment of how terrible the Hyuugas were at raising children for all their self-professed importance.

"I didn't...I didn't think that any of those promotions would matter to him. But when Shikamaru asked me if I wanted to join his team with Lee...I couldn't refuse...and I wanted to take that test. Not just for the village, but for me." Hinata smile is unguarded now, open, honest. "It occurred to me that I didn't care what father or the family thought, but that I wanted to be an Anbu so I could work with my friends for the benefit of the village.

"When I got in, though, I decided I was going to tell father after all. I knew he'd been a hunter-nin once, long ago, and that maybe he would be interested. I found him in his study, working on something. He never turned around, but when I told him, I thought I had given him a heart attack, because he froze."

Kurenai is captivated. Hinata almost never tells stories, almost never talks this much. She is so different now from the girl that had failed her first chuunin exam, who had cried in her arms and told her how she couldn't bear to face her family after so many years of putting up with their indifference.

"After a while, he opened a drawer at the side of his office, and took out a cloth bundle, saying that I should have it. And then he closed the door and went back to work. But when I opened it in my room, the only gift he's ever given me, I...I cried."

Hinata stops, reaching forward, and gently removing the lid on the box with her slender, faerie's fingers. From inside the box, resting on a pad of black velvet, is a white and red grimace, a snarling, tiger-faced mask. Crimson whiskers and gums streak perpendicular to the tabby streaks on the contorted, angry features of an angered cat.

"This is...this was...father's Anbu mask. I didn't know he'd kept it...when he gave it to me, I felt like I had earned my place there again. Whenever I felt like I was lost, or like I was unwanted...all I had to do was look at it.

"I want you to have it, Teacher, because you also made me feel like I had a place somewhere," Hinata concludes, carefully touching her fingertips to the gnarled lips, to the immaculately carved teeth, and over the twisted brow.

For a moment, Kurenai is speechless, and she feels so underdressed, so unprepared, and so undeserving of the honor that Hinata has so gracefully engineered. And despite all that, she stands in her ancient, threadbare robe, the same one she's had since she was a much younger version of herself, and holds Hinata like she did when the girl first showed up at her home in the middle of the night so many years ago.

"You're sure you don't need it any more?" Kurenai whispers, unwilling to let go of this girl, her girl.

"No," says Hinata, and the finality in her voice is enough to convince Kurenai that her girl has finally grown up.

OoOoOoO

It begins with the byakugan, thinks Neji to himself. It always does.

Hanabi starts first, impatient and yearning to end this, to bring it all to an end. Hinata stands on the opposite side of the bridge, and they face off against each other across the koi pond which meanders through the garden. Darkness and shadows fill the yard, rippling over meticulously raked sand beds and carefully nursed flower bushes. Artfully placed stones and boulders and a handful of preordained trees complete the postcard picture.

Nothing is out of place here, except for Hinata and her admittedly admirable temerity.

Hanabi moves, in an unannounced rush of motion, an abrupt, graceful dash of spontaneous momentum and force. She's quick, deft and the mistress of the kind of speed that assassins need in their everyday lives. Her assurance and confidence are unmistakable, her entire body leaning forward in this fatal lunge, her fingers pointed, charged with chakra. Hinata, for her part, is still, standing square, her palms open by her sides but otherwise unprepared, unready. Her stance is neither offensive nor defensive, nor belonging to any martial art that Neji is familiar with.

Hinata makes no move to defend herself, and Neji is stunned. Was Hanabi right? Is this Hinata's way of removing herself from the picture? Honorable suicide? Death by soriricide?

An audible gasp rises from the family as Hanabi's strikes begin to hit home. With each step, each punch, each stab, Hinata begins to stumble backwards, twisting with the blows, letting them connect. Three stabs into her ribs, and her breathing grows irregular, each breath coming in short bothered pants, as though it is painful to breathe. With her right hand she cradles herself, holding her injured side until it, too, falls limp under Hanabi's unrelenting assault.

Finally, her instincts win over, and she begins weakly warding off the blows, parrying softly, ineffectually. Her footwork is atrocious, she isn't even trying, and Neji wants to shout at her, bellow that she's better than this, but he is bound not to intervene. His face remains the same impassive mask it has been all night, and he catches through the corner of his eye the confused look on the house elders' faces. His teeth grind together in frustration, as he wonders what the hell she is doing.

She takes another step back, and he realizes, perhaps for the first time, that he might be worried. He has always been at odds with the main house, antagonized by his eternally inferior position, bothered by the equanimity with which his father accepted his role as Hiashi's body double. Even now, Hiashi's assassination at the hands of Toyama -- the murderer now stripped of his family name -- makes his father's sacrifice seem like a unforgivable waste.

He is ashamed, too, because he knows Toyama's secret, how he escaped the fatal curse seal long enough to finish Hinata's father while he was still shocked. Ashamed because he accepted this forbidden knowledge, even if he hopes he will never use it.

It is none of his business who wins this fight, who succeeds Hiashi...but he now suspects that Hanabi is perhaps the more spoiled of the two, the least mature. Hinata has proven that tonight, which makes him wonder -- what is she doing, letting herself get mauled like this?

Something is odd, though, he thinks, and a frown creases his face. Hinata is not falling apart like she should. She should be weaker now, her critical chakra points slammed shut by each of Hanabi's impeccable blows. She should barely be able to stand. Hanabi doesn't seem to have noticed, continuing her relentless assault, driving Hinata backwards with an inexorable steadiness.

Hinata stumbles once more, taking two steps back, and Neji recognizes instantaneously Hanabi's posture, the stance that can only lead into the sixty-four palms. She's playing the family's trump card now -- if she pulls this off, it truly is over, and Hinata will have lost.

In the dim beige light of the lanterns, Neji thinks he catches Hinata's tiny, almost invisible grin, and suddenly everything that has been bothering him about this fight comes together in his head like a jigsaw puzzle assembling itself.

Hanabi's assault is a blur of motion, suddenly brightening with her aura as he activates his own byakugan, watching her, and his every suspicion is confirmed. Hinata flies backwards, her back arched like a dying swan as she plummets head-first into the koi pond. A plume of water flies skyward, dotting the observers with water droplets as it then crashes back, following the girl who had fallen.

And then silence reigns.

"Somebody get her out of there before she drowns," Hanabi says, softly, something, perhaps regret, tinging her voice, as she turns to walk away.

"It is over," the elder says, to no one in particular.

Neji places his hand on the old man's shoulder. "No," he whispers, feeling two beats of his heart pass in the stillness as a servant rushes to Hinata's aid, "not yet."

The servant is cut off as Hinata's soaking form lurches up out of the pond. Her eyes are closed, but the veins surrounding them are suffused and swollen with blood and chakra -- she can see. Water sloughs off her ascending body like chains of pearls, glinting in the moonlight. A single lily pad is draped over her arm by its stem, trailing in her upwards flight free from the water.

There is no sign she was ever injured.

OoOoOoO

"I...have a place now," Hinata says, smiling softly. She'd never expected to have to stand up so quickly, to be forced into taking that place. She'd always assumed she'd be ready for it when the time came, and the cold dread that had seized her when she heard the news that her father had died still clings, still resides somewhere in her small chest. "Don't worry about me, please."

Still, it was too early.

"I'm not sure I can help it," Kurenai mutters, sitting back on her heels. "When Neji beat you in your first exam, watching you was the hardest thing I've ever had to do in my life. I wanted you to give up, to surrender, because you were killing yourself." She bites her lip, looking down at the snarling tiger resting in its varnished coffin on her table. "But you needed that fight. I'm glad you tried. I'm...I'm proud of you."

Hinata cannot help but blush, staring at a point three feet into the floor, in the ground. The pretense of formality has long evaporated, and Hinata knows somehow that this place will never lose its identity as home, not while Kurenai lives here.

"Thank you," is all she can think to say.

Kurenai snorts. "I think this is why they tell you not to get attached to your students," she grumbles, pretending some degree of aloofness again, knowing that neither of them are falling for it. "You end up sounding like a total sap."

Together they chuckle, a pealing of glass bells.

"I think...Kiba would appreciate the advice," Hinata offers in her usual small voice, a voice still hued with amusement. "I understand he has nominated his own students for their exams for the first time after three years."

"...which is perfectly normal, unlike the lot of you," Kurenai adds, raising an eyebrow. Bah, she'd always be jealous of her student's talents, not that it mattered. "Given how much he complains about them, I wouldn't worry about him being too attached."

"Mm. How is Shino? I haven't had time to see him recently."

"Ah...I was wondering when you'd ask." Kurenai grins. "He's getting hitched, but don't tell anyone yet...I think he's trying to decide when to tell..."

Gradually, their conversation drifts into a time long past, to a place, to a feeling that neither of them has visited in a while. They regale each other with new stories about old friends and ancient lore that only they know, and Kurenai finally finishes her long-interrupted breakfast. When Hinata finally stands to leave, she has finished her third cup of tea.

Oddly, she doesn't feel like she's pretending when she straightens her back and squares her shoulders. She is now, and always will be, Lady Hyuuga. Perhaps one day she will be an elder, too.

Outside, she looks up at the white walls of her home again, at the window where her room once was. Then, closing her eyes, she basks for a moment in the brilliance of the sun, where she belongs, drinking in its warmth with her entire being.

"Neji?" she asks the thin air, from whence he appears.

"Mm," he interjects, not saying anything and everything at once.

OoOoOoO

Hanabi's reaction time is formidable, but its not enough to stop Hinata's rush. Even as she reactivates her byakugan, Hinata is already upon her, her sharp, angular knee landing a crushing blow against her kidney.

This is not jyuuken; this is a blow designed to stagger her. Not that is necessarily needed. Hanabi doesn't understand, she can't. Mere seconds ago, she was the victor, the winner of a shallow victory over a pathetic opponent who hadn't bothered to even protect herself. She'd finished with a show of force, a flawless performance of the family's proudest technique.

Only one man had ever stood up after being struck by the sixty-four palms, and he had a demon sealed in him. How the hell did measly, incapable little Hinata survive?

Hanabi manages, barely, to ward off another hard strike to her torso, and she winces as she realizes that was a feint to give Hinata ready access to one of the more critical chakra points on her right, and dominant, arm. Hinata's expression is unreadable as the pain of Hinata's invading chakra surges through her veins and her elbow is suddenly sluggish and unreliable.

Now she staggers back, rebounding lightly away from one of the banisters guarding the edges of the bridge over the pond, and Hinata casually discards the errant lily pad clinging to her arm, letting it slide back into the water. Hinata's eyes are still closed, water streaming down her face from her hair, and Hanabi realizes she is merely avoiding letting the water in, knowing how much of a distraction it would be.

Hinata is more focused than she has ever seen her before, and Hanabi cannot help but wonder if her weakness was always an act, if she was merely hiding and hoarding her strengths in the manner of the most devious shinobi.

No, impossible. Hinata has dignity, now, and even then, and she is not that clever.

"How..?" Hanabi gasps, her right elbow limp at her side, her thighs marked with the telltale circular petechia that jyuuken leaves behind. "How did you get up?"

Hinata does not answer right away, falling into a defensive stance now. No; she'd always known Hanabi was better at this, at the jyuuken, at being the holder of killer intent...Hinata had only leveled the playing field.

"You said you would kill me," Hinata replies, "I could not allow that; I promised."

"That wasn't an answer!" Hanabi screams, rushing forward, her left hand readied. It would not end this way, it could not, and she is still good enough to put down Hinata with only one good hand and half her speed, if she focuses everything she has into this one strike.

Her sister's calm is infuriating, agonizing, and she fails to recognize the beginnings of the kaiten as she crosses into Hinata's personal boundary. When she does realize what has happened, it is too late. The edge of the moon-bright spherical storm catches her and flings her like a ragdoll, her entire body limp and burning with the flashfire immolation of foreign chakra. Time slows to a crawl, and she can count the stars flickering overhead as she falls, descending as though on strings, and she lands with a thud in one of the perfectly groomed sand beds. Hinata is standing over her immediately, immobilizing her with additional pinpoint strikes.

It is not until she attempts to move that she realizes that she is essentially paralyzed. Out of chakra, and out of energy. Her eyes slide shut into unconsciousness and she is grateful she will not have to face the unavoidable ignominy.

Neji finally removes his hand from the elder's shoulder.

"She allowed her emotions to interfere," is all he says. The elder nods, understanding. He suspects that the genius behind him knows how Hinata avoided the crippling sixty-four hands, but bears no illusions about divesting Neji of the secret. Hinata is the head of the house now, and there is no question: she is unconquerable within the clan, unopposable.

OoOoOoO

Hinata offers Neji a smile, one which she knows will go unreturned as they make their way slowly back to the Hyuuga compound. They weave their way through the village, Neji always sure to walk exactly two paces behind her at all times. Hinata stops momentarily at the market, offering to buy him an apple like the one she purchases for herself, but he declines.

"You didn't have to come," she says, "I think I'm safe here."

He grumbles to himself, dismissing her. "I didn't think you'd need help," he retorts, moving smoothly into the topic he wishes to discuss, never wasting time. "I know what you did."

Hinata stops, closing her eyes, formulating her response. "I know you do...and I know it will never work with you, Neji. But I want your help. You, and Hanabi both. I cannot do this alone."

Neji draws up short. "You should. The others all have," he snorts. Why admit her weaknesses now?

"No," she says, after some deliberation. "I didn't want to be the head of the clan, brother Neji. But we have to stop hating each other...and if everyone hates me, then maybe you and Hanabi can reconcile the two houses."

On that note she starts walking again. What she'd done to Hanabi had been ludicrously simple, but for someone as tradition bound as her sister, doing it successfully had been ludicrously easy. One, simple genjutsu to create the illusion in her sister's mind that her chakra points were all in different places from where they really were, and the 'gentle fist' style was completely disarmed.

Only Neji understood. Only he could. Slowly, he begins catching up to her.

"Yes," he says, finally and with great effort, before they reach the heavy gates blocking the gap in the Hyuuga's fortress' walls, "you...may be right."

Hinata smiles to herself as Neji excuses himself and departs, walking away into the core of the city; perhaps this was worth all the hassle after all, she thinks, passing through the gates into her clan.

OoOoOoO

Author's Notes:

So, no, I don't think Neji would ever allow himself to show any kind of weakness or fallacy, but he matured significantly after his fight with Naruto. I think by the time this story might come about, he would be ready for the kinds of responsibilities I've given him, and I think even he would accept Hinata if she proved she were ready to take them as well.

Hinata...I hope I did Hinata well enough here. I think, judging from Kurenai's reaction's to Hinata and Neji's fight, that Hinata is the student she watches most carefully, and with good reason. I think, under the circumstances I've described here, that they might bond more closely, so I hope I got that across; urgh, I hate writing dialogue between women.

I think I portrayed Hanabi correctly, in that I tried to give her all the arrogance and overconfidence of the Hyuuga, inherited, clearly, from her father. I don't think she's a bad person, however, judging by what little we've seen of her, so I tried to temper her a little. Anyway, I'm going to upload and go to bed.


	4. Life in the Zone::The Game

Twilight deepens an overcast sky, painting it the colour of wet slate with broad strokes as a thin, misting rain sifts down over the quieting streets of Konoha. In the distance, far over the high, leafy ramparts of the surrounding forests, stark, crooked shafts of violet-tinged lighting lance down over the distant plains. As she walks, Tenten counts the seconds from each strike, waiting for the near-inaudible thunder to crumble past her ears as she revels in the cold evening, celebrating the first rain since the beginning of this long, dry summer. The rain is barely there, and as she walks, she can't even feel her face or clothes getting wet, a soft damp velvet feeling that caresses her as she walks. She loves this rain, it's delicacy and gentility, and it relaxes her.

Her walk is unhurried, casual, and she knows she draws stares from the other pedestrians as she makes her way home. Like most of the others in her occupation, she has the right to wear one of the olive green vests that mark her as a ninja in the service of Konoha, but she doesn't. Everything she needs, every last kunai, every last blade, every last needle, is concealed somewhere on her person, under the sash around her waist, intricately woven into her hair, or magically buried in one of the many summoning scrolls she carries with her.

For all this circumspection, however, she still carries her primaries openly, largely because they have too much bulk to hide. Strapped on the left into the sash at her waist, she carries two swords, a paired katana and wakizashi, black scabbards inlaid with dancing silver dragons, the hilts wrapped in red leather twisted into overlapping diamonds. In the small of her back and at her right shoulder protrude the hilts of a pair of kodachi. She is lethal with any of these weapons, but she likes the situational flexibility of carrying them all at once.

She thinks of herself as uniquely blessed among the warriors of her village; anything with a point or a blade is her domain, and she is considered unmatched among them. Even more reassuring is that if she is exhausted or otherwise unable to access her stores of chakra, she is still a singularly deadly fighter, because the technique can carry her where strength cannot.

Around her, the neighborhood is changing, mutating away from the cluttered, crowded settlement nearer the downtown into a more cloistered, quiet region along the river. The street is cleaner here, less littered, more groomed. It looks, she thinks wryly, like money.

She is right. All the powerful clans, the wealthy families, live together here, in this neighborhood. She's familiar with the area, largely because she passes through it almost every day on her way to and from headquarters, or on her way out of town to her favorite training area. She's also familiar with it, because this is where her one-time team-mate Hyuuga Neji lives. The thought of him summons unbidden images to a secluded part of her mind, and she wonders if he is home right now. After all, she is passing the Hyuuga residence on the right, it's great stone walls surmounted by polished black tiles and lined with cherry trees.

She supposes she could always check. It's too late now to bother going in the front door; the gates are probably locked and sealed for the night. One of the residences, and the one Neji lives in, is built flush with the wall, and the jump to his room is something easily accomplished by one such as herself. His lights are off, though...he is either asleep, which is unlikely, or absent.

A sly smile gracing her lips, she bends to pick up a handful of pebbles from the edge of the road, and begins chucking them absently at the glass. A pair of carved oriental gargoyles grimace outwardly from the corners of the eaves, and she wonders just how good they actually are at warding off evil.

Apparently not good enough, she thinks, stunned, as shouting erupts from inside the compound, and a gout of flames mushrooms over the high stone walls.

OoOoOoO

"...Lee with the pass..."

"...intercepted by Inuzuka, passing to Uzumaki, who goes in for the lay up..."

"...stopped by Tenten! Back to Lee..!"

The instant the ball leaves her fingers, she braces herself for her landing, knees folding slightly as her toes and then her heels touch down on the hot, dusty asphalt outside Konoha's ninja Academy. For the life of her, Tenten has no idea how Rock Lee and Naruto are providing running commentary at the top of their lungs and playing as hard as they can simultaneously.

Her sandals squeak on the tarmac as she plays catch up, crossing in front of Chouji, who presides as judge and umpire with all the appearance and presence of a shogun on his massive throne. Ruining the image is Akamaru, who is more intent on the illegal acquisition of Chouji's lunch for his own nefarious purposes than on the outcome of the game. For all his legendary speed, Lee is beset on both sides by Naruto and Kiba, who is also blocking his passing lane to her.

Still, Kiba's slower today, without his usual animal intensity, and she knows he must be a little hung over or tired from the reunion party they'd managed to cobble together the night before. She knows she was this morning, so one recovering player per team is fair. Naruto, for some reason, never gets hung over -- she imagines he's well practiced at the art of binge drinking from all the time he spends in the company of that old oddball Jiraiya.

Cheers gush from the impromptu crowd of students and passing citizenry as Lee finds an opening, his loose white undershirt and green shorts flaring with the violence of his lunge past Kiba and the ball is headed straight towards her. His breathlessness doesn't shut him up, though.

"...Lee breaks through, to Tenten...good for three!"

His announcement is preemptive, but always prophetic, when it comes to her, anyway. Her toes are just over the three point line, but that's not an issue as she bounds lightly backwards, just short of Naruto's rushed jump to block her shot, and she releases the ball just as she hits the top of her arc. She allows herself a proud grin as she touches down, watching the ball carve through the air with just a little backspin. There is a clatter as it smacks the back of the rim, scurries around within the hoop, and then plummets straight down through the net.

"Yes!" shouts Lee, "another three for Team Gai!"

Tenten shakes her head, and by extension the complex knot of hair looped around and through itself at the back of her head, then gives her watching students a little wave before darting off backwards to block Kiba's pass lane. Lee and Naruto dance around each other on the court, shouting their commentary at each other.

"At least they're having fun," Kiba groans from behind her.

"Don't distract me," she jokes, edging across in front of him while he tries to break free. "Besides, we're hosting this, remember? Did Ino make it home all right?"

Kiba stops, trying to mess up her rhythm by changing his, as he tries to spin out from behind her. Naruto's looking for a pass now, and Lee's physical game is starting to shine as he looks to steal the ball.

"Yeah," he grunts, finally breaking free. His family's fighting style is very up-close, closer to brawling than fighting, very focused on throws and locks, and he's used to dealing with people at close range. "Can you believe these two?"

"Every week," she shoots back, grinning, as he snags Naruto's pass and scrambles in his uniquely feral manner for her basket as she launches into pursuit. He's faster than she is, and since the rules of this game forbid the use of chakra, she knows he'll get his shot off before she can stop him. Once more, the ball leaves the realm of human interference and sails in the hands of Newton until it smacks off the backboard, deforming slightly before rebounding down and through the steel ring to give Kiba and Naruto another two points.

OoOoOoO

Across a frozen instance of time, she plants one slender foot against the smooth stone of the Hyuuga compound's outer wall and catapults herself upward, catching the edge of the wet ceramic tiles with both hands and lifting herself into a crouch on the top of the walls.

There are very few visible people, most of them servants rushing to cover inside the buildings along the outer walls, but the courtyard is, at the moment, a bit of a mess. A smoking crater, lined with the tell-tale black carbon scoring of an explosive enchantment and the unmoving body of someone in Hyuuga family robes mars the otherwise constructed serenity of the manor, and silhouetted against the smoke by the small fires scattered across the grounds she can see the fighting.

She doesn't need the byakugan to know that this is more than any ordinary family quarrel, and the azure glare of the kaiten fills the yard as she leaps from the wall to one of the storehouses, landing catlike on all fours before bounding forward again.

Twisted laughter fills the air, crawling out of the smoke and through the cleansing rain, a trespassing demon in an otherwise pacific evening, and she observes, evaluating, as another unconscious member of the branch house is dragged away from the fires, from the lone man standing in the courtyard. She is at once confused and perturbed at this outrageous disturbance of the peace, and the laughter presses in on her mind, a conduit of insanity as she watches the man stumble in a tight circle, hands pressed against his face, against his forehead.

His devilish chuckling ends as abruptly as it began, and he falls to his knees, screaming. Tenten cringes involuntarily. It is the sound of unadulterated pain, the sonic issuance of hell, the howl of a tortured beast. It grates against her, alternately swelling in intensity and diminishing into a hoarse whisper of its former self before crashing outwards again with all the same agony it had before.

The man, if he is one, and not some otherworldly abberation come for vengeance, slams his forehead into the ground, once, twice, thrice, before falling completely still. She barely has the time to wonder if he has died before he lunges upright again, cackling maniacally, shouting nonsense into the darkening heavens and the gentle rain.

Gradually, his laughter dies down, collapsing slowly, imploding, and the man collects whatever remains of himself, drawing his mind from a blurry caricature back into sharp focus, and his milky eyes meet Neji's where the newcomer stands on the entrance steps to the main hall facing the courtyard.

"Toyama," he growls, staring at Hyuuga Hiashi's filial assassin with a clouded expression, "surrender, or I will cut you down where you stand." Neji's voice is shockingly cold, an unyielding waterfall of ice water, and Tenten is certain she has never heard it so profoundly imperative before.

Toyama's only reply is more, mocking laughter which segues without warning into another scream. He drops to his knees again, clutching at his temples, and then staggers off across the courtyard, in the general direction of the main gates.

"Never," he whimpers, in a miniscule, grating voice, fighting himself through the monstrous pain emanating from the swastika magically engraved in his forehead. Neji doesn't dignify this encounter with any further discussion, and strolls down the steps, into the rain, his loose sleeves trailing after him.

Tenten is confused, to say the least, on her interloper's perch at the summit of one of the guest houses. Toyama stumbles back against the massive gates of the compound, clutching at his face, at his forehead.

The sound of tearing canvas growls into the air and Toyama throws something at Neji, who handily dodges the weak attack...and then he looks at the ground in consternation. Tenten can't see what the object was from her distance, but then she looks at Toyama again and gasps in horror.

There is nothing but bloody bone where Toyama's marked forehead once sat. As he stands there, leaning back against the massive gates secluding the Hyuuga's realm from the outside world, he begins to laugh in earnest; this time mingled with a high, sobbing undertone that crushes her entire being with its chill.

"Never," Toyama says, grinning through the crimson mask that scores his face with a hundred braided rivulets. "Never, never, never," he repeats, slowly tying a long strip of cloth torn from his own robes around his defiled visage, around the gaping hole where he has scalped himself with his stained, ragged fingernails. "Never."

All Neji can do is stare at him.

OoOoOoO

At some point, Tenten leaves reality far behind. Kiba says something to her, and Lee and Naruto never stop their competitive shouting match, but it's all far, far away. Some infinitesimal component of what remains of her conscious mind recognizes that she is now in the zone. It's a curious feeling, a little like coming home and leaving the universe all at once, a separation and melding of mind, body, and the external world.

The part of her that is separate, aloof, distant, wonders where the exact separator is, as she dribbles at full tilt past a surprised Kiba, who lopes alongside her on long, gangly legs, trying to catch up. She feints as he overtakes her, draws back, and takes a clear shot on instinct alone. The usual clang of rattling metal and vibrating rivets is absent, and the ball falls straight through the tattered, water-stained cords of the net, rebounding noisily off the pavement which shimmers in the heat.

Far, far in the distance, Chouji marks the points, brushing crumbs off his fingers and his scorecard as he does so. Kiba takes a moment to rest, panting, and for a moment she thinks she can see herself standing next to him. Her mind feels somehow elastic, snapping back into place as she continues to run. Perhaps this is all a biochemical reaction to intense activity, or perhaps some more metaphysical process, but she isn't complaining.

Things happen in the zone. She's aware she is the force behind it, controlling it, but at the same time, they happen on their own, without the interference of her own faculties of rational thought. Time has no meaning. There are no hesitations, no worries, no doubts.

Only her, her objective, and her tools.

Somewhere in the vast reaches of the tesseract her mind has become, through the blur of motion, through the bright patches of people she knows on the court, through the static painted grid demarcating the edges of the court, she notices that Lee has the ball again. The fruits of his theft don't benefit him long, and the ball passes into her jurisdiction, climbing off the ground with a gentle forward spin.

Her hands are barely aware of its uniform, pebbled texture, and her body moves of its own accord as she moves up towards her goal, her objective. Naruto's body sails into place, obstructing her line of sight just as she prepares to throw. Her reaction, she notes, observing, is perfect, an underhanded blind pass under Naruto's upraised arm.

Lee finishes the game by taking the ball from its temporary station in midair and plunges it into the goal with one upraised arm. Another victory, she is sure he is shouting, for Team Gai.

The dance, then, is inevitable, and she turns away so she won't have to watch.

When she stops moving, she becomes acutely aware of the bass thrum hammering at her ears, her heartbeat magnified and exaggerated by her state of borderline exhaustion, and her lungs heave with the effort of clearing tainted breath from her airways. The focus of the external world, long absent, reestablishes itself slowly, building blocks of clarity assembling and collating piece by piece from the clear centre of her vision until the universe is whole once more, and Tenten is naught more but another component within it, rather than the sole lord over of one of its fragments.

Game over, and Chouji confirms this, putting down his lunch only long enough to make the announcement.

She reaches for her towel, draped over the chain-link fence at the edge of the Academy grounds like a small vermillion flag. It hits her face like an oasis, a moment of dry calm, reminding her just how tired and probably sore she really is, and will be, once the adrenaline and the endorphins wear off. Groaning softly to herself, she slumps down against the cold grass and waits for the others to join her. From the far side of Chouji's court, her students are sprinting across to her, congratulations and questions already spilling out of their juvenile mouths.

OoOoOoO

Tenten remains hidden until the two men in the courtyard begin their fight in earnest, their eyes lighting up in the mounting darkness with a dull grayish glow. Her right hand is preoccupied with a fistful of kunai produced from the back of the sash around her waist, so she gives Neji a small, casual salute with her left, knowing full well he can see her. Of course, so can his opponent, but he doesn't let it show.

For his part, Neji remains serene, his body and legs folding themselves within his long robes into the strike stance of the jyuuken, the voluminous pants and jacket giving him a bulk his wiry body doesn't have, and emphasizing the menace engraved on his face. Still, he gives the slightest, almost imperceptible shake of his head, and she understands. The kunai in her hand retreat to their hiding place.

This is his fight, his duty, and she will heed his request for her noninterference unless things get really tight.

Toyama relaxes, bleeding away his ordeal, and he mirrors Neji's stance. The dust and smoke from the earlier explosion settles quickly in the dampening, crescendoing rain. The first real drops settle into the dirt, pocking it with moisture.

Neji strikes beautifully, like a snake, his entire body uncoiling, springing forward, unwinding. Balanced, equidistant steps close the distance in seconds, keeping his head level with the ground, and when he finally collides with Toyama's guard there is so much force in his advance alone that the ground beneath them is dispersed. Together, they slide back five inches, locked together in the opening movements of a mutual symphony of aggression.

They begin trading blows with furious speed, chakra flaring between them, flames in a furnace. They are hoarding their strength, preserving it for what they know will be a long, aggravated battle of wits and endurance as much as skill.

She is so intent on their battle, on waiting to see if Neji will need her help that she almost fails to notice the strangers assembling outside. Neji catches them, though, with those all-seeing eyes of his, and in the midst of his own personal fight, flashes her an ancient hand signal from the days when they used to work together.

Tenten catches the hint, stunned, and follows his directions, peering down from the top of the wall. There are six of them, two entire teams shrouded in black, and what the bloody hell are they doing here? They're not from Konoha, that much is certain, and their postures speak of malice and foul intentions.

One on six, she thinks, airborne before her katana has even cleared the sheath, and on the ground in front of the massive gates of the mansion just as her right arm reaches its maximum adduction. Fair enough, she adds mentally, for her benefit, as she exits her crouch, ascending, her blade already climbing upwards through a tangled nest of flesh and bone, raining gore on her first victim's nearest companion.

One on five.

"Aah," she breathes, returning her sword to a resting, two handed position in front of her, "I don't know who you are, or what you think you're doing, but you cross this wall over my dead body."

"That, we can do," snorts one of them, and he draws his own weapon, a sickle with a weighted chain attached to the haft, a kusari-gama. "But she's mine." The other four turn back towards the wall.

Shit, she thinks, they're not falling for me.

"Neji! Incoming," she shouts, hopefully giving him enough time to do something about it.

OoOoOoO

"Well played, teacher," comes a muffled voice from somewhere on the other side of the terry cloth pressed against her face. Tenten folds the towel carefully, and throws it into her bag, which she shoulders casually. All three of her students came today, an oddity, considering how seriously two of them take their role as ninjas. Strange that they wouldn't spent the morning out training somewhere in the forest like she used to do so many years ago herself.

"I don't get it," one of those two born warriors intones, her voice that of a girl not yet become a woman. Here it comes, she thinks. "Why waste all that time playing a game with no purpose?"

Tenten grins. "Two reasons: one, it's fun," she says, her first reason the one she knows they won't understand, even though they should be children, "and two, it is training, believe it or not."

"Training?" the girl frowns. She's from a family with a long line of ninjas, dating almost beyond the very founding of the village. Tenten likes her, not for her less-than-sparkling personality, but because she works incessantly, towards her goals. On top of that, she suspects the girl might have a little bit of a heroine complex towards her, which flatters her ego more than she would otherwise admit.

"Yes, training. Endurance, strength, accuracy, teamwork, tactics," Tenten says, marking the items on her list with her fingers. "It all happens very quickly on the court, so if you can't keep up, you have to learn or lose. Furthermore," she adds, quickly, before they can say anything, "with only two people to a side, we have to teach ourselves how to cooperate successfully even with one man down."

Reaching back, she plays with her complex bun, pulling out the dagger-sharp needles holding it in place, and fixing its shape with steady fingers before returning them to their hiding place. She'd explained her oft-extravagant seeming hairstyles before to this girl -- she'd grown her hair out long enough that the utilitarian buns she'd once sported were no longer practical, but it made infiltration missions a breeze. People tended to remember only what her hair looked like if she was in a crowd, and could describe it in great detail, without really knowing who she was. If she needed to, she could pull it out, rearrange it, and disappear again. Not to mention the weapons she hid in there...even a kunai which she could use like a whip if the entire arrangement were pulled apart.

The girl seems to understand, but one of her boys, the other little soldier, takes it to the next step. "How come you don't use chakra? It would be much easier, and you wouldn't be so tired afterward."

The boy who has attended almost every one of these games has a shit-eating grin plastered all over his mug, and she points a finger at his lips. "You, quiet," she commands, "you already know. Can you two figure it out?"

The two genin in the dark stare at each other, while Tenten heads back towards the main building of the Academy where she will continue the rest of their training for the day. With the chuunin exams looming on the horizon, she's cancelled all of her students' off days...although that doesn't necessarily mean she has to cancel her own plans.

The other two still haven't gotten it figured out by the time they reach the small gardens out front, where she sits them down in the dense shade of a handful of brushy peach trees, heavy with fruit.

"Okay, you get one hint. Where does chakra come from," she finally allows her third student, who does his best to mimic old Iruka as he lectures them.

"Chakra comes from stamina," he says, "when you use hand seals to convert it, or when you focus it to help you run faster or jump higher."

"Right. So? Any ideas, you two?"

"But if you always train by using chakra to help you..."

"...you're not improving your stamina!"

"Exactly," Tenten finishes. "So from here to the chuunin exams -- which I've nominated all three of you for -- you're all going to practice not using your chakra. Today, I want as many laps around the village as you can give me, using your body's energy. Got it?" She grins as their groans filter up through the haze of adrenaline withdrawal.

OoOoOoO

It's not long before Neji's superior technique begins to demonstrate why he is considered one of the most dangerous men in Konoha. As good as Toyama is, even good enough with the advantage of surprise to down Hyuuga Hiashi, he is not good enough to keep up with Neji's inhuman speed and the sheer, calculated cruelty of his strikes.

Nevertheless, he has one trump card, and he has been playing it repeatedly -- his intense, though illegitimate, study of the ancient knowledge of the main house, an entire scroll's worth of secret Neji has never been privy to. For example, he knows how to disrupt the stance and the sequence that lead to the otherwise deadly sixty-four palms, which is preventing Neji from ending this quickly.

Neji is distantly aware of a growing frustration within him, but he knows better than to let himself be bothered by it.

An involuntary growl rumbles from deep within his throat, and he stabs at Toyama's shoulder, breaking the flow of chakra there entirely, and Toyama's arm falls to his side, inert. Less than a fraction of a second later, he has Toyama pinned against the massive doors with his entire body, his bloodied head band inches away from the empty, self-inflicted crater in Toyama's face.

"Why?" he growls at the man who was once his distant cousin, disowning him with the very tone of his voice. He would kill him here and now, but something within him demands that he know.

"Don't play innocent with me," Toyama whispers, his voice a shrieking wreckage of the pleasant baritone it had once been. His face is drooping on the right side, the skin hanging leprous from the bones, a twisted mirror of Neji's own handsome Hyuuga heritage. "You're like me. You hate them just as much as I do. Why not?"

Behind Toyama, behind the sparkling constellations of lines that represent the very flow of mental and spiritual energy through his body, he can see Tenten's unique pattern, the one he knows inside and out, by heart. In the world gifted to him by his eyes, her blade is a shadow of itself, a bare outline of steel clutched in the convoluted golden coils of her hand. He is proudly aware of how little chakra she uses compared to these intruders, compared to nearly everyone else he has ever met. It's the only thing that had allowed her to keep up with him when they were younger.

He watches her land, and the subsequent upwards cut that instantaneously renders one of the figures' coils dark.

Toyama cackles incoherently, finding in his infinite well of hatred the strength to try pushing Neji off him, but fails. He changes tack.

"I can tell you how to escape your curse," he whispers, seductively, "Listen..."

He tells his cousin, even as he is ground further into the door by Neji's unyielding shoulder.

It's terrifying. Enough that Neji lets go, backs off, long enough for him to hear Tenten's shouted warning through the falling rain, and a scream as she claims another one of the ninjas waiting for Toyama outside with a long thrust, the edge of her blade skyward.

"I," he announces, slowly, carefully, "am not like you. I...refuse."

Through the wall, he can see her katana cutting through an interrupted arc, throwing aside a thrown kunai with all the casual disdain of a haughty queen for a peasant. The sword never stops moving, even as she plucks the falling dagger from the air with her free hand, a balletic presentation of martial prowess which he never ceases to believe exists solely for his enjoyment.

She reminds him, without speaking, of why he must do this, regardless of his fury, his own hidden grudges, the ones he is working to set aside, as she completes her spin, releasing the stolen kunai back at its owner.

Another scream, this time gurgling -- Tenten must have punctured someone's lung -- but not enough. Two of the ninjas are over the wall already, and he can see that she can no longer ignore her last opponent, circling her, chain swinging in lazy arcs that accelerate and decelerate at its master's will. Tenten's ghostly sword is dripping pink and speckled with gold, water mixed with the involuntarily drained serum of her first three victims and the vanishing sparks of their dying chakra, her face splashed with the spray.

He knows, from the pattern of energy coiled around her skull, surging just beneath the scalp and the pitch black hair she keeps pulled back into whatever complicated pattern it is in today, that she is in her most heightened mental state of combat.

She's doing what she can, for him. He needs to end this.

On either side of him, the ninjas pass into his rear, knowing they can surround him, but never hide from him. They were clearly well briefed, but he knows it won't be enough.

OoOoOoO

Slowly, despite the protests of her calves and thighs, Tenten sits on one of the low concrete retaining walls lining the granite walkway and enclosing the flower beds. With a sigh, she fishes into her bag again, finding a plastic bottle of water with a pull top. This she opens with her teeth, and drains about half of it in one go. The full-body stretch that follows is best described as unladylike, and she knows it.

Absently, she watches Kiba dismiss his students -- they're a full year older and more experienced than hers, and he doesn't worry about their performance any more -- and wander off on his own, Akamaru sliding up alongside him.

"Later, Tenten," he says, waving. Akamaru shakes his head uproariously, his brown-patched ears slapping the air around him in a futile attempt to take flight, shambling past her on rangy legs that look far too much like his master's. "Catch you later, and I guarantee I'll kick your ass next week when I'm not exhausted."

"Good game, Kiba," she replies, salving his injured pride with a smile, before shredding it with her words. "Next week, I won't be recovering from a party either, so expect to get your ass kicked...unless we play those two clowns, then we kick their asses."

"Ha, yeah. If I see your students goofing off, I'll let you know."

"Thanks," she says, unpacking her swords and the rice paper for cleaning. It's a brilliant day, and she can't think of anything better to do right now. Besides which, she almost believes that if she takes care of her gear, it'll take care of her.

On the court, Naruto and Lee are still playing, doing their best to coerce Chouji into joining this time. Smiling to herself, she leans back against the peach tree, debating whether or not she should stand up and pick one of the ripe, pale orange fruits, or do it the easy way, with a shuriken, instead.

Her katana passes lazily through her fingers, passing through the folded paper in long, smooth strokes starting from the base and ending uninterrupted at the tip. She watches herself in the flat of the blade, watches the face of her optical doppelganger grow clearer as she systematically clears away the accumulated grime from the last couple of days. There may even be some dried, powdered blood in the dust on the blade, but she tries not to think about it too much.

"You can come out now, you know," she says quietly, "I can see you."

True enough, she's caught him in the reflection of the blade, and she meets his eyes with hers on its mirrored surface. As usual, he strays off topic, switching to the conversation he would like to have. She doesn't mind much, she's used to it by now.

"You were distracted in the early game," he says, stepping out of the shadows, sitting on her right. He's the only one who will brave sitting on the blade side while she's cleaning.

"Long night," she explains, shrugging, as the tip of her katana glides through the space inches from his straight, tall nose. "How'd you guess?"

"You were hitting the rim."

She snorts in faint amusement. "So I drank some. How was your night? People were wondering where you were." If he weren't Neji, she'd expect him to sigh or shrug. He doesn't do either.

"Family matters."

"It's always family matters with you," she replies, accustomed to his terseness and his overwhelming sense of dignity. "Hinata finally did it, did she?"

His hesitation in answering confirms her suspicions right away. "Yes. She is Lady Hyuuga now." He pauses, while she allows herself a self-indulgent smile. "How did you know?"

"Lucky guess," she lies, knowing him and his cousin far better than they would ever admit.

OoOoOoO

A flash of lightning crackles to the ground much closer to the village than before, strobing through the street, a fleeting, impermanent sun. Less than two seconds pass before thunder rumbles down the street rocking the fragile cherry trees in its path, and Tenten's unoccupied mind registers that the storm must be moving. Before her, her opponent's cloak is speckled with rain, and she can feel the sky-born water running down her face, a heavenly ablution that carries away the blood splashed across her cheek and nose.

She doesn't have the time to wait for him to make the first move, which she would like, so she feints high and spirals around to strike low, keeping her eye on the weighted chain he keeps in perpetual motion. It loops around his body and a figure-eight and he finally chooses his moment to strike. The iron weight sails around the curve of his elbow, lancing straight towards her face. Tenten's body reacts for her, dropping her out of its path, and she crouches low with her left hand on the cobblestones and one leg extended out to the side as the iron swirls over head.

Her opponent seizes the initiative and lunges forward, sickle at the ready, but her sword sweeps up of its own accord, slicing through the path of his arrested charge, cutting open his concealing garment and dropping it to the ground.

The patter of falling rain is incredibly distant, as though she were listening to the storm from the bottom of a deep well, but she recognizes the pattern on his headband, the unmistakable boulder insignia of the Iwa ninjas. He retreats, swinging the weight in defensive circles, and she watches her body assume another stance, the katana held out in front of her at a forty-five degree angle to the axis of her body.

It's an invitation, and she knows it...and he accepts. The weight flashes through the air again, this time catching the blade of her sword and wrapping around, a creeping vine of metal ensnaring her weapon, and he moves in with the sickle to deprive her of her right hand.

She doesn't have to think. Everything now is instinctive, built into her, rehearsed and practiced. The form, the style -- every movement is as much a part of her as the act of breathing. Her entire entity is devoted, in this timeless moment, to this engagement. She is a dancer more than a warrior, the clash of steel more for her a performance than the casual, political murder of her opponent. She lives on a bloody stage, plays in a bloody game, but she is in the zone and does not care.

She still remembers the first man she ever killed, a ninja nearly ten years her elder who made the erroneous mistake of leaving her alive while he went on to attempt the assassination of the man she had been asked to protect. She remembers how the pain faded into the haze of her personal universe, how she stood in spite of a near-fatal wound, how easy it was to cut him open and twist her kunai in the wound so that it would not close. She remembers the shock and resignation in his dark eyes as life fled from him. She does not remember exactly how many times he was stabbed.

After that, it all became routine, so much so that it frightens her sometimes.

Her body twists, her left side crashing towards him, and he never sees her other hand slip free from the twisted red leather to grip the pearly handle of the kodachi behind her back. In the flickering blue light of another lightning strike, it flits through the air silently, and she severs the nearest of his carotid arteries in an elegant backhand stroke. He will die in three minutes, but to be certain, she buries the shorter of her two blades in his left eye on the return trip.

As he goes limp, the tension on the chain binding her and her sword vanishes, and it slides from from the steel, pulled away by gravity's grip. With a flick of her wrist, the blood slides cleanly away from her stained metal friend, and she does the same for the kodachi, sheathing both.

The pounding of blood and the rush of air in her chest slam into her as she stands still in the downpour. Around her in a rough semicircle are the remains of four men, one of whom is still alive, though barely, his own kunai lodged painfully in his own chest.

She doesn't stay still for long, too caught up in the momentum of the zone, and she vaults back up towards the wall.

OoOoOoO

Tenten holds her sword in front of her face, inspecting it with a critical eye. Satisfied, she returns it to its sheath, and props it up against the tree behind her, then settles back against the fragile bark, listening to it crackle as she leans into the tree. Neji remains upright, his back straight and supporting himself by virtue of his muscles alone. Idly, she runs a hand down his back as he speaks, and she notices how tense he is, how stiff and unyielding the flesh accompanying his spine is.

"Your students are becoming competent," he says, and she knows he means it as a compliment, in spite of the tone of his voice and the obvious potential for sarcasm in the phrase. If anything, Neji is never sarcastic...usually far too honest for his own good.

"Thanks," she says, folding her hand into a fist and rocking her knuckles against a hard spot on his back. He doesn't say anything, but his posture stiffens a little, involuntarily, and she knows he's humoring her, too. Maybe she knows him far too well for her own good. She sighs, softly. "It's still bothering you, isn't it?"

"What is bothering me?"

"Hiashi," she says, pulling her fist away from his back and sitting up next to him. "You've been evasive and stiff all week," she says, purposefully neglecting to add cantankerous, "and I think it's eating you."

He turns to look at her, his eyes glinting with lilac as a beam of sunlight filters through the leaves over him. She notices the bags under his eyes and wonders if he's been sleeping well recently.

"Perhaps," is all he says, before returning his attention to the distance, and as far as he is concerned, that is the end of the conversation. She lets him think that, reaching behind her for one of her kodachi, which she proceeds to clean in a similar manner.

"You know," she opens abruptly, just loudly enough to jar him out of his reverie, "I still remember the first time I had to kill a man."

Neji nods. "You told me; he left you alive."

"Yeah. But even though we had emotional training and I'd spent years telling myself I was doing the right thing...nothing really prepares you for your first kill. Nothing really prepares you for the way they look at you when you die. I tell my students everything I was told, but I know they aren't going to get it until they have to do it the first time." The rice paper slicks over the blade, evenly, rhythmically, and she likes the sound. She is a musician, and these are her instruments.

He doesn't say anything, listening to the sound of her voice, and she goes on. He probably didn't have any problems with his first kill, but it's her perspective, and she knows he's listening, because he hasn't stood up to leave.

"I spent a couple of months struggling with myself. I couldn't shake the idea that all this was somehow wrong, and I tried to rationalize. I tried to tell myself that it wasn't me doing it, that I somehow changed once I entered the zone, that I became someone else. Or I tried to tell myself that I was doing it for the village, that I was doing it because it was my duty." Tenten sighs here, flipping over the blade in her calloused hands. "None of that worked."

She carefully separates the outermost sheet of rice paper, setting it aside to discard it later, and goes on wiping down her blade with methodical strokes.

"Eventually I realized that the politics didn't matter...and that I had to come to terms with the fact that I do kill people for a living. But I did realize that I do it because I can help people. Protect them, or protect the things that make life worth living for them. And that makes me...happy, I guess.

"Maybe that isn't the right term. But I learned not to focus on the things I couldn't do, like keeping everyone I came across alive."

Neji finally gets the point, and he tilts his chin down towards his chest when he speaks, eyes closed. His face is all angles and planes, and she regards him as perhaps one of the most well-assembled young men in the village.

"I failed," he says. "Not Lord Hiashi...I disliked him. I failed my father. He trusted that I would do his duty, and replace him as the guardian of the main house."

And he is, underneath the armored layers of identity he wears, still a human being, she thinks. Under the Hyuuga, the genius, the Anbu...he is still a human being.

"You did your best," she says, "I know, I was there. And you couldn't have known what he was going to do beforehand." She stresses the word 'he', and they both know who she is referring to. "So what makes you happy?"

OoOoOoO

Toyama wastes no time upon the arrival of his allies. While he may be insane, he is not incompetent, and whatever plan he agreed to enact with these intruders goes into action immediately. Using his forbidden knowledge, he stabs at himself with pointed fingers, re-opening a handful of the dozens of points Neji has forced closed.

His hands whip through a series of seals, and Neji recognizes the order at the last possible second as a serpentine gout of flame flashes out from behind his erstwhile cousin at him.

It is massive, incandescent, a sentient rope of surging fire, and he stands directly in its brimstone laden path. He is not the head of the Anbu for no reason, and he moves to counteract it in the best way he can think of. His own hands tear through a series of poses, and he does not fail to produce exactly the correct quantity of chakra. Once complete, he slams his palm against the ground, his form an insignificant black point massively overshadowed by the onrushing fireball.

He summons a wall of solid, super-cold ice, which surges out of the ground less than two feet from his unflinching face. Toyama's incendiary assault slams into it, instantly sublimating it into steam, but it absorbs all the energy without allowing any through. The byakugan cuts through the mist and steam occluding everything, but Toyama is still there, and Neji rushes to perform his own counter-offensive...and comes to a skidding halt as he hears a sharp clack and a howl directly behind him.

Tenten is behind him, kunai in hand.

"They knew about your blind-spot," she whispers, gravely. She could tell, coming over the wall. The way they were oriented, the way they responded to Toyama's flashy diversion and their reliance on Neji's burning desire for vengeance. She's tried the same thing too many times herself. Just how much did Toyama tell them before hand?

One of the remaining two Stone ninjas is lying on the ground, Tenten's sharpened metal spikes protruding from his chest, throat and forehead.

"Mm," he utters, and she knows he means 'thank you'. He assumes his attack stance again, and secure in the knowledge that nothing more will be able to harass him from the rear.

Only Toyama's victorious grin can dissuade his confidence, and it does.

There is no warning as the courtyard detonates beneath their feet, dirt and stone stretching skyward, spires of rock and gravel rocketing skyward, fingers of a massive clay-streaked hand which closes down around them, compressing and crushing them under a dome of earth.

Silence and darkness surround them, but Tenten can feel him shaking with impotent rage as he tries to move and realizes that his limbs are locked against him, immobilizing him. It's a capture technique unique to the Iwa village, she remembers, one that buries its victims in stone and clay, and immobilizes them without suffocating them immediately. Still, she knows they've only got about half an hour's worth of air, maybe half that, since they are sharing the same air chamber.

They are crushed together, back to back, just as they were standing before the ground rose up to claim them, and she waits for him to regain control of himself before speaking.

"I'm sorry," she says, spitting out a mouthful of grit, "I was too worried about the one aiming at you with the bow, I lost track of where the other one was." Sometimes, she wishes she had the byakugan too.

Neji coughs, and there is a long pause. "No," he says. "It is also my fault. I was too concerned about Toyama, or else I would have paid him more heed."

He's still angry, and she leaves it at that, wishing she could do more than wiggle her toes. Minutes seem like hours, in the darkness, and she wants to reach up and run her fingers through his hair, to calm him, to comfort him, but she has to content herself with the warm press of his shoulder blades against hers.

Finally, a fist shatters the darkness from above, and Rock Lee is peering in, a portable lantern in his other hand. They must have just returned from a mission somewhere.

"Are you okay?" he asks, genuinely worried, before Neji questions him coldly about Toyama's whereabouts.

"Didn't see him," Shikamaru says, his voice distant, "but we caught this one Stone guy here...I'm guessing you'd like me to forward him to Hibiki." Shudders run through the dome as Lee begins pounding it back into rubble.

Neji only closes his eyes and tilts his head back against Tenten's, and leaves her to explain everything to a confused Hinata who appears at the aperture, her Anbu mask raised over her face.

OoOoOoO

"You," Neji concedes, as she puts away her kodachi.

He's still too solemn, too dignified, too caught up in the endless political intrigues and the familial infighting that rule his world. Without saying anything, she whips a shuriken up at the branch overhead, catching the peach where it falls into her hand.

"I'm glad," she says.

The only way to break the facade, she knows, is to be the one who can violate his personal space, to distract him, and she does. He isn't using his damned byakugan right now, so she snakes up next to him, insinuating herself into the space between his shoulder and his neck, and plants a small, gentle kiss in the hollow beneath his jaw.

"Tenten," he says, and she smiles as she recognizes the barest hint of embarrassment in his voice, the barest quaver in his otherwise steady speech, "not here."

"Only if I get to finish later," she laughs, mocking him as only she is allowed to, before taking a bite out of her peach.

OoOoOoO

Author's notes:

Eh, I figured I'd throw in more about Toyama. Seriously, dude is fucked in the head, and I didn't think I'd really show that well enough in the first chapter. So there it is.

Also, I think I should probably bump up the rating -- it's hard to describe anything Tenten does without a lot of blood and people coming apart at the scenes, if only because what she does is cut things up. She's another character with virtually no depth in the manga, and it's a crying shame because her chosen path is by necessity a brutal one. Her first kill, by necessity, must be worse than anyone else's because sharp and pointy objects tend to be a little more invasive.

Ahem. Neji: because I've been wanting to focus more on the neglected female characters, I did kind of gloss over his duel with Toyama, so in a way, it fails to demonstrate Neji's true abilities as a fighter. Nevertheless, it is meant to be something of a conflicted fight for him, for a lot of reasons. For one thing, Toyama is patently insane, a by-product of freeing himself from the cursed seal. For another, Neji would never have anticipated a family member attempting the murder, not to mention that Hiashi is already dead at this point.


End file.
